Jurassic World: Dominion

  The second Jurassic World movie was an unexpected amount of (extremely dumb) fun, and it made me kind of wonder if the third one in this new trilogy might be any good, especially since there were some good bits in the trailers for it.

 No, it is not good. It is bad. It is fucking bad. It is the worst thing I've seen since Glass, and honestly I'm pretty confident in saying this is way worse than that. It is a cynical, hacky piece of shit where you can feel the contempt the writers have for the audience in every beat of it's cockamamie plot or every worthless utterance of its shitty characters.

 Either the strains of directing and writing were too much for Colin Trevorrow to apply the modicum of fun he applied to Fallen Kingdom's script, or maybe I forgave it too much because that was directed by J. A. Bayona, who is that much better at infusing the inane story with an energy and beauty undeserved by the material... I don't know, and at this point I don't care. This is pure shit, and some cool dinosaur bits can only mitigate that to a small degree.

This guy (or gal). This is one of the folks that slightly mitigate the overwhelming turdosity.

 So yeah, I guess it's safe to say I didn't like it! And I really don't feel like giving a movie I've wasted two and a half hours of my life to more time, so this will be quick and hastily written because this deserves much, much less than that.

 Here, let me illustrate just how bad this is. The two non-entities played by Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard (imagine two decent genre actors getting to inhabit two characters as the protagonists for three whole movies - eight or so hour's worth of material! and not making the least impression other than an annoyed 'ugh, these guys again?' whenever they appear...) Anyhow, they've recently arrived at Malta looking for their daughter. Malta has, Wikipedia informs me, just over half a million inhabitants, and they home in on an illegal underground dinosaur market because that's a thing now, which, ok, that's cool.
 So Pratt and Howard are looking for their daughter, who for blah blah shit plot reasons was abducted by a big company. Bryce Dallas Howard literally goes up to a random stranger - literally no reason to chose her over the other hundred or so people in the market - and it turns out... it's a smuggler with a heart of gold that happened to see her daughter mid-abduction and feels guilty about it. One of the maybe dozen people who know anything about her on the whole island.

 You hear that? That, my friend, is the sound of the writers not giving a fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

 And that's what we're dealing with here. Shitty basic contrivances like this are basically what drive the plot forward. The action is deeply mediocre, there are no stakes because this movie is terrified of killing even tertiary sympathetic characters (guess Trevorrow misinterpreted why people disliked the childminder's death on part one). So the dinosaurs are as a result not scary, because they can't kill anyone unless they're evil.

 Yes, they bring back the characters from the one movie in the franchise everyone likes, except well, now they have to work with Trevorrow's lines and the b-plot of a movie that doesn't have much of a main plot in the first place. Goldblum is just let loose and allowed to be Goldblum, which in another movie would be lazy and distracting, but here at least his (what I'm guessing are) ad libs are kind of better (not by much) than any of the material anyone else gets. Poor Sam Neill is absolutely terrible, overemoting and mugging like an idiot, and given the general downturn in everyone else's acting quality, I'm sure as hell not blaming him.

 There are some bright spots. The movie is bookended by some neat vignettes of dinosaurs not-so-gracefully integrating with our modern ecosystems, and that's by far the best part of the movie, all ten minutes of it. There's a really good scene where Dallas-Howard is slow-chased by a hairy, fingernaily dinosaur that was really well done, I guess Trevorrow expended most of his talent in composing that scene. The Malta bit, which I was looking forward to was a major disappointment, an extended action scene that tries to crib Mission Impossible and has some cool concepts but fails because, well, to be kind, it's not directed by someone as capable as Christopher McQuarrie, and the way it develops is stupid as the rest of this turgid mess.
 Oh, I did like when the shaggy/fingernaily dinosaur teams up with a T-Rex at the end to take out a bigger dinosaur [umm... spoilers!] That's the type of stupid, stupid shit I can get behind. And also, because the budget for this is around a cubic shit-ton of dollars, there's a bunch of really nice shots, both CGI and some good photography.

 But seriously? Just avoid this shit. Avoid it like the fucking plague. I believe in redemption, but I'm sure as hell not giving this motherfucker Colin Trevorrow another chance to waste my money and time unless the waters have been well and truly tested by viewers braver than me.