Jurassic World Dominion review: ‘dismal’ script stifles Dern-Neill-Goldblum reunion

Last month, Tom Cruise showed the world exactly how you breathe “new cinematic life into a much loved old classic”, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. But sadly, this sixth film in the Jurassic Park franchise “is no Top Gun: Maverick”. While there’s a “certain pleasure” in seeing Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neill reunite for the first time since Steven Spielberg’s original 1993 movie, Jurassic World Dominion has “nothing in the way of emotional heart”, and it doesn’t offer many thrills either.

Starting where the last instalment left off, dinosaurs are roaming freely around the world, and a “sinister biotech company” in the Italian Dolomites has resurrected an extinct breed of super-locusts in order to wreak havoc on the world’s food systems. There are some decent set pieces, but the plot is baffling and the actors never really make it out of second gear. “I came out unshaken and entirely unstirred.”

Director Colin Trevorrow “cannot be faulted for effort”, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times; he has thrown “everything into the blender to see what sticks”. But the result is “the kind of mess you get when you gene-splice a blockbuster not just with the previous five films in the series, but all the other blockbusters within a 50-mile radius”.

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Whatever fun might have been had with the Dern-Neill-Goldblum reunion is stifled by the “dismal script, which peppers every scene with corny asides”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. And the dinosaurs themselves – formerly “star attractions” – are now “humiliatingly surplus to requirements”, left to mill about with no real part to play in the plot. The film will no doubt make a fortune, but “in credibility terms, it’s an extinction-level event”.