When the island’s dormant volcano begins roaring to life, Owen and Claire mount a campaign to rescue the remaining dinosaurs from this extinction-level event.

If ‘Jurassic World’ was a reboot for the series that started with ‘Jurassic Park’ in 1993, then ‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’ is the sequel, and it suffers from many of the problems most sequels tend to suffer from. After the events of the last film, the island of Isla Nublar has been abandoned to the dinosaurs as the characters from the first film have gone back to their own lives, only to be brought back together when the volcano on the island threatens to erupt and make the dinsoaurs extinct all over again. This leads to an ill thought out return to the island for Chris Pratt’s Owen and Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire, alongside a couple of new annoying sidekicks, to rescue some of the dinosaurs and bring them to a sanctuary ran by Sir Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell), John Hammond’s former partner.

The film introduces several other new characters into the mix and it becomes clear the intention to bring the dinosaurs to a sanctuary is a ruse to use them for more nefarious means. This is telegrammed from the outset and isn’t really a surprise, and ‘Fallen Kingdom’ doesn’t even attempt to hide who the ‘bad’ guys are going to be and you can tell what the twists and turns are going to be from a mile off. Another frustration is the reliance on characters making dumb decisions to get the plot from A to B and whilst you can suspend your disbelief to a certain extent in a film with dinosaurs, it starts to stretch credibility at numerous points. I did think the film had some nice directorial flourishes as we’ve come to expect from J.A. Bayona and he particularly excels with the ‘haunted house’ type stuff that harks back to a famous moment in the original movie.

‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’ isn’t a bad film and it entertained me reasonably well for 2 hours, but its becoming increasingly clear there are fewer places to take this franchise and I can’t say I was particularly intrigued by the options opened up by this film.

Rating: 3/5

Directed By: J.A. Bayona

Starring: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Ted Levine, Rafe Spall, Toby Jones, Justice Smith, B. D. Wong, James Cromwell and Jeff Goldblum

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4881806/