Director Colin Trevorrow, fresh off the delightful, small-budget ($750,000) Safety Not Guaranteed, steps up to the $150,000 million Jurassic World. To quote some street jargon, Trevorrow’s not playing. The first flat-out summer blockbuster, Trevorrow’s film knows when to go hard and when to tread lightly. In the spirit of executive producer Steven Spielberg, Trevorrow’s screenplay (with co-screenwriter Derek Connolly and two others) takes its time setting up relationships and events. When the action finally comes, it’s no holds barred. For good measure, the star of the best popcorn movie of last year (Guardians of the Galaxy), Chris Pratt, provides tried and true charisma and bad-ass cred–just in case all the dinosaur talk and theme park politics gets a little stale. I mean this guy actually has killer dinos (velociraptors) eating out of his hands–dolphin style–for chrissake. By film’s end, he’ll be leading his raptors on a life-or-death motorcycle chase.
Since it would be unimaginable for a film in this franchise to be without a couple of kids running around getting in trouble, eleven-year-old Gray (Ty Simpkins) and 16-year-old Zach (Nick Robinson) provide just that. They serve as stand-ins for the 20,000 park attendees to whom the film pays merely intermittent attention. Shuttled off to Jurassic World under the auspices of spending some time with their aunt, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), who’s a numbers crunching administrator at the park, the lads get shunned by the workaholic, clueless-about-kids aunt. When they find themselves out on their own roaming among Stegosauruses in a plexiglass gyroscope just when the shit starts hitting the fan, well that’s when–harrumph–Owen (Pratt) comes along to play Mr. Rescue.
Sporting the same humorous interludes of Safety Not Guaranteed, Jurrasic World plays up the strait-laced Claire’s aloof response to Owen, who once dated her. Their interplay, while bordering on sitcom-ish, primarily works–mainly due to Owen’s cajones. She may grapple with having to finally get her hair missed up, but Owen makes it fun, and she doesn’t exactly come up short in turning herself around.
To think there’s a controversy resulting from director Joss Whedon’s tweet that Trevorrow is actually practicing a little sexism here. His complaint sounds like no more than sour grapes. Whedon’s Avengers: Age of Ultron isn’t half the entertainment that Jurrasic World is. If the film’s leading female character may seem a little stereotyped, there’s certainly equal time on the male side. Vic Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio) seems to be practically foaming at the mouth at the prospect of converting Owen’s raptors into military tools for dominance. Hoskins seems like a character who roamed into the wrong movie but D’Onofrio possesses such good acting chops he’s allowed to stick around for awhile before he inevitably goes kicking and screaming.
Yet Hoskins is only the runner-up craziest character in the film. B. D. Wong plays Dr. Henry Wu, the mastermind geneticist behind the creation of a hybrid mutation dubbed Indominus Rex, whose aggressiveness far outdoes all the nastiness of existing dinosaurs. (Seems attractions like kids riding baby Triceratop dinos in the park’s version of a petting zoo can only take you so far in building up the ecotourist business). When billionaire owner of the theme park Masrani (Irrfan Khan) questions Wu on his gene-splicing models that seem to have gotten out of hand, Masrani is ludicrously shocked upon discovering the scale of it, as if it were a mere detail along the lines of choosing how much to charge for a soda (Jurassic charges $7.00, by the way, which is only slightly higher than the current going rate at American ballparks). When Masrani accuses Wu of creating a monster, Wu condescendingly mutters back that to a mouse a cat seems like a monster. Humans, accustomed to being the cat, become uneasy when they have to take on the role of the mouse. No kidding, Wu. Maybe you’ve begun to get Jurassic fatigue after appearing in all four of these films.
Despite such lapses into schlock, Jurassic World keeps its foot on the gas. Although I could have done without one or two of the many dinosaur battles, it keeps a brisk pace and delivers the right amount of spark. Horror movie tropes and film references, including snarky nods to Spielberg films, provide optional icing on the cake. This isn’t Shakespeare but it sure isn’t Joss Whedon either.