Butler's Cinema Scene

“JURASSIC WORLD”  My rating: C+ 

 124 minutes  | MPAA rating: PG-13

Bigger. Faster. More teeth.

That’s the corporate mantra at Jurassic World, the island theme park built on the ruins of the original Jurassic Park. This business stays on top by every few years introducing a spectacular new genetically modified attraction to keep the crowds coming.

Because with the short attention span of the average tourist, plain old dinosaurs aren’t enough.

“Bigger, faster, more teeth” is also at the heart of the movie “Jurassic World,” the fourth entry in the groundbreaking special effects series.

Back in ’93, when Steven Spielberg unveiled the original “Jurassic Park,” just 10 minutes of CG-animated dinos was enough to guarantee a blockbuster. But in tech-savvy 2015, lifelike dinosaurs are a dime a dozen.

So we all know going in that the dinosaurs are going to be convincingly great. But can the series’ stewards surround the big brutes with a story and characters that matter?

Uh … no.

Director Colin Trevorrow (maker of the low-budget time-travel film “Safety Not Guaranteed”) works with three fellow screenwriters to distract us with a surplus of dinosaurs and action. But mostly “Jurassic World” is content to rehash ideas that were worn out when “Jurassic Park III” came out in 2001.

Not even uber-likable Chris Pratt can dispel the pall of been-there-done-that.

Pratt plays Owen, a Navy veteran working with a quartet of velociraptors (those man-sized mini-tyrannosaurs) he has raised like ducklings. Owen has trained these carnivores to treat him as their alpha male. They don’t take orders, exactly, but at least they don’t have him for breakfast.

What Owen doesn’t realize is that in the massive park geneticists have been mixing DNA to create the baddest dinosaur ever, the Indominus rex. Except that their new creation is way smarter than a lizard should be and has curious skills, like the ability to conceal itself by changing color and body temperature.

Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard

Of course this nightmarish bruiser breaks free and goes on a rampage, killing everything it encounters — mostly other dinosaurs and the heavily armed security teams dispatched into the jungle to bring it down.  (This is a movie where if you’re fat or wear a uniform you might as well pin a bullseye on your chest. If you’re fat and wear a uniform, you’ve got about as much chance as the guy in the red shirt on a “Star Trek” away team.)

Among the all-too predictable characters here are a couple of threatened kids — adolescent brothers played by Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins (the older one ogles girls, his cute little bro spouts scientific nerdgasms). Their aunt Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) is a bigwig in Jurassic World management; initially she’s a money-driven corporate drone, but after a day spent in the company of hunky Owen trying to rescue her nephews she sees the error of her ways.

Wrong right up to the bitter end is Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio), a bombastic militarist secretly working to “weaponize” Owen’s raptor buddies and send them into combat (sort of like those dolphins the U.S. Navy reportedly trained to plant bombs on the hulls of enemy ships).

Despite the high body count, “Jurassic World” is essentially bloodless. And though the park visitors are terrorized by dive-bombing pterodactyls (a scene weirdly reminiscent of the flying monkeys sequence in “The Wizard of Oz”), there appear to be few civilian casualties. No little kids are snacked on.

At least “Jurassic Park” has no illusions about what it’s selling, and in fact offers some witty observations on theme park experiences: $7 sodas, tots riding triceratops instead of ponies, a saurian petting zoo, and a goofy ride video starring an accident-prone Jimmy Fallon.

The cleverest touch, though, is feeding time, when families gather around to watch a big raptor chow down on a tethered goat. Take that, PETA.

| Robert W. Butler