Jurassic Park III

Jurassic Park III ultimately falls right in line with its immediate predecessor, as the film, though equipped with a handful of effective sequences, simply isn’t able to carve out a place for itself as a legitimately necessary followup (ie there’s nothing within the narrative that advances the Jurassic Park story as a whole forward). This is despite the welcome return of Sam Neill’s Alan Grant, with the affable character convinced to return to the dino-infested island under false pretenses and eventually forced to once again fight for his life. It’s worth noting Jurassic Park III strikes a negative chord right from the outset, as the movie reveals that Grant is no longer with Laura Dern’s Ellie Sattler – with this almost astonishingly boneheaded development essentially undoing Grant’s entire character arc from the first film. Once the viewer gets past that colossally misguided decision, however, Jurassic Park III manages to establish itself as a quick-paced and action-packed thriller that does, for the most part, hold one’s interest throughout (even if the whole thing basically vanishes from one’s memory before the end credits even finish rolling). The by-the-numbers nature of Peter Buchman, Alexander Payne, and Jim Taylor’s screenplay ensures that there’s a paucity of sympathetic characters, and it is, as a result, almost easier to root for the dinosaurs than it is to root for the humans. (Neill’s expectedly charming Dr. Grant is essentially the sole exception to this.) It’s finally clear that Jurassic Park III, sporadically entertaining as it is, never quite establishes a compelling reason for its very existence, with the Grant/Sattler breakup making a very strong argument for the film to be retconned out of existence.

**1/2 out of ****