In a sentenceEveryone lies to Sam Neill to get him back on the island, and by the end we understand why he needed persuading
Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) has spent the years since Jurassic Park refusing to talk about it and struggling to fund a Montana dig, where his assistant Billy Brennan (Alessandro Nivola) is building models of raptor skulls. Paul Kirby (William H. Macy) and Amanda Kirby (Téa Leoni) arrive with a chequebook and a request: fly over Isla Sorna, the second dinosaur island, as their guide and the dig is paid for. What they do not tell him is that their son Eric Kirby (Trevor Morgan) went parasailing off the island with a family friend, Ben Hildebrand (Mark Harelik), and has not been seen since. Grant agrees. The plane lands, the Kirbys’ hired men shout into a loudhailer, and something larger than a Tyrannosaurus rex walks out of the trees.
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Joe Johnston’s third Jurassic Park film is fast, short and frightening in short bursts, and it has been made from a script with two good ideas and no third act. Worth a wet afternoon with children who can take a fright; not worth much more.
Eight years after Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) and four after The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Joe Johnston takes the director’s chair and the series changes shape. Gone is the awe and the long approach to the first brachiosaur. What is left is a 92-minute rescue picture in which a small party is dropped onto an island and chased off it. That is a respectable thing for a monster film to be, and for an hour Jurassic Park III is a good one. Then the script runs out, and the film stops rather than ends.
The setup is brisk and the writers, Peter Buchman, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, have one clever notion: Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) does not want to go. He is tired of being asked about the park, and he lets the Kirbys (William H. Macy and Téa Leoni) buy him for a flyover. Neill plays this with a weariness that feels earned and slightly personal, as though the actor and the palaeontologist had both been dragged back against their better judgement. It is the best performance in the film and the only one with any weight.
The creatures are the reason to watch. Shelly Johnson shoots the island in a grey-green murk, so that the animals come out of the picture rather than posing in it. The first attack, in a clearing at dusk, with a spinosaurus walking up to the stranded aircraft as if it were a tin it meant to open, had us properly frightened; it is staged with the camera inside the fuselage and the animal outside. A later scene in an abandoned InGen laboratory, Ed Verreaux’s set of dust sheets, broken glass and rows of hatching tanks, puts one raptor in a room full of hiding places and lets us wait. Robert Dalva cuts both sequences tight and lets us follow.
The second good idea is that the raptors talk. Grant has spent the years since the park working out that the animals communicated, and the film pays this off by letting them hunt with intent rather than appetite: they call, they wait, they send one round the back. It is the one place where the film adds to the series, and it produces the film’s most unsettling image, a raptor’s head tilting to listen.
Everything human is thinner. Macy and Leoni are two capable actors and they have been given a squabbling couple whose every line is either a shout or an apology for shouting. Leoni is written as a woman who screams at the wrong moments and is then told off for it. Alessandro Nivola’s Billy makes one decision that drives the plot and is otherwise a haircut. Michael Jeter’s Udesky, John Diehl’s Cooper and Bruce A. Young’s Nash are the mercenaries, and you can put money on the order they will leave in. Laura Dern turns up as Ellie for two short scenes and a telephone call and is missed the moment she goes.
Don Davis’s score leans on John Williams’s original theme, and the borrowing is a confession: the new material is competent and the old material is what we remember. Betsy Cox dresses everyone sensibly and mud does the rest. None of the craft is bad. It is the shape that fails. Around the seventy-minute mark the film has spent its monsters, its laboratory and its one idea, and the last quarter of an hour is people running towards the sea while the film looks around for a climax it has not built. We will not describe how it resolves, but we were startled when the credits came up, and not in a good way.
This has the opposite fault to its predecessor. The Lost World was long and had too much in it; this is short and has too little. Johnston made The Rocketeer (1991) and Jumanji (1995), and he knows how to keep a family film moving, but moving is all this one does. It carries a PG, runs 92 minutes, and is a fair bet for a rainy afternoon with children who enjoy being scared and have not yet started asking why.
Most critics lean mildly positive, though few claim much for it. The praise clusters on brevity and pace: a lean 90-minute runtime, a headlong rush to the dinosaurs, and a B-picture modesty that several reviews prefer to the bloat of The Lost World. The effects and creatures, the Spinosaurus and the raptor sequences in particular, are admired even by critics who dislike the film, and Johnston’s no-frills direction is credited with keeping it moving.
The reservations cluster on script and scale. Several reviews find the story thin and rushed into production, a generic rescue plot with none of the original’s wonder, and note that it skews young and plays closer to horror than adventure. The spread is wide: the Evening Standard rates it far above both forerunners, while The Guardian and Variety consider the series exhausted. Later reappraisals from Collider and Polygon are kinder, treating it as a guilty pleasure or an accidental parody.
The critic calls it hugely imaginative and far better than its two forerunners, praising its concentrated shocks and intent to frighten, while noting it is very frightening for children under 15.
Read the full review →The film is a more acceptable unnecessary sequel than most, with strong effects and monsters that steal the show despite a pared-down plot aimed at kids.
Read the full review →The review highlights the film's lean 90-minute length and headlong momentum as a welcome improvement over the bloated earlier entries. It singles out the director's ruthlessness and the screenplay's focus on pure action and danger for praise.
Read the full review →The critic finds the film more fun and streamlined than its predecessors, with a speedy, no-frills approach that focuses on raptor encounters and survival thrills. It is praised for its brisk pacing and effective use of the dinosaur premise in a shorter runtime.
Read the full review →The critic praises it as the sequel Spielberg should have made, a fun, lean B-pic that gets to the dinosaurs quickly with solid characters and humour, though it lacks a showstopping climax.
Read the full review →The film offers little new but remains stirring family entertainment, trading Spielberg's wonder for violent action and sound effects. It has the fun feel of a 1950s B-movie with strong animatronics and well-handled child characters.
Read the full review →Part of · 3 of 7
Jurassic ParkThe original, patient and frightening, with the wonder this one leaves out.
TremorsA small-town monster film that knows exactly how long a joke and a scare should last.
GodzillaThe great creature film, grave and grieving, from a country with reasons to be.
The Land That Time Forgot · not reviewed yetBritish dinosaurs on a budget, and rather charming for it.
Rogue · not reviewed yetAn Australian crocodile film that keeps its tourists stranded and its nerve.
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