Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-
Special Effects: B-

When push comes to shove, every single one of the Jurassic movies is dumb—yes, even the groundbreaking original 1993 film Jurassic Park, in spite of it being a justifiable favorite of many (including myself). News flash: cloning extinct animals is not actually possible. But! That first film is expertly paced, sprinkled with humor that reliably lands, is cleverly constructed, and all of that is on top of early-stage CGI effects that somehow still hold up nearly thirty years later.

There have now been two separate trilogies in this franchise, and it was never any surprise that, on average, it’s been diminishing returns. I would argue that the first Jurassic World (2015) was a step up from Jurassic Park III (2001), but Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) wasn’t quite as good—but it was close. It was close enough, in fact, that even with a worse script, it was still enough thrilling fun to give both of those films a solid B. Bad writing, great thrills—the net result was something I still very much enjoyed.

And I have been particularly excited for the third Jurassic World installment since the end of the last film, when (spoiler alert!) the dinosaurs were finally all brought to the mainland and let loose in the wild. It was clear that the next film would live up to that title, with dinosaurs roaming all around the world, interacting with modern environments. Exciting stuff. And indeed, the opening sequence of Dominion offers the very kind of thrill that promises, with a giant sea dinosaur chomping down on a crab cage off the coast of Alaska. It then cuts to a “Now This” video about the state of dinosaurs around the world. It feels, for just a moment, that it’s all uphill from there, but Colin Trevorrow—who also directed Jurassic World but not Fallen Kingdom, but he did co-write all three—takes it in the opposite direction, evidently so he could run this franchise into the ground.

It’s like Jurassic World Dominion is in a sprint to be by far the dumbest installment in this franchise’s 29-year history. I won’t deny there are some thrilling sequences, particularly a raptor-and-motorcycle chase through the streets of Malta (Dumb? Of course. Thrilling? You bet). Oddly, after the previous films wasted no time getting to the action, this one spends a lot more time on the characters, which would be a good thing if the characters were interesting. Even Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), arguably the most compelling character in the original Jurassic Park and now making his fourth appearance in the franchise, is rendered nothing more than a puzzle piece for contrivance, platitudes and a nostalgia trip.

I was so excited when the trailer to this film was first released, revealing the return of both Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Ellie Satler (Laura Dern). I literally got chills. I had just loved that first movie so much. What a disappointment, then, to find them in this movie completely phoning in their performances, presumably struggling to hide their embarrassment over the lifeless dialogue they were saddled with. I kept imagining them reading the script for this movie for the first time—and then groaning. But then, I suppose, just throwing their hands up and saying, “Well, a check’s a check!”

I suppose this is where I should say something about the perennial Jurassic World leads, Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt, but why bother? They never did anything but serve as by-the-numbers human characters who were always secondary to the creatures who have always been the draw in these movies. But that’s what is perhaps most disappointing about Dominion: the creatures themselves. The special effects in Jurassic World movies never did break new ground and always just ran on the fumes of the stunning effects of the first films, but at least they were serviceable. In Dominion, there are several shots depicting a raptor suddenly turning around and running away, and they very much look like a computer effect, and distractingly so. The whole point of these films at the start was how stunningly realistic the dinosaurs were. Now they’re settling for what looks like a rush job, for what? A cynical expectation that the movie will make a ton of money regardless?

I hate to say it, but this movie is so badly written it makes the previous two, which had scripts plenty bad in their own right, look like masterpieces by comparison. Every turn of the plot, every corner a character goes around, is met with a preposterous lack of logic. Trevorrow regularly throws in clear visual references to the original Jurassic Park, maybe so we won’t notice. In one insanely stupid sequence, Grant and Satler infiltrate the lab of yet another villainous head of a genetics corporation, scanning a digital wrist band given to them by Malcolm in order to get through doors. The ease with which they do this strains plausibility even by the standards of these movies—and then they reach said lab and there’s not another human to be found anywhere. Jurassic World Dominion is full of these sorts of conveniences, designed to make it easy for the characters to get quickly to the next plot point.

BD Wong appears yet again, also his fourth appearance in the franchise as Dr. Henry Wu—he was in the original Jurassic Park and is in all the Jurassic World movies—and his moral place in the franchise has been all over the map. It seems he’s given a shot at redemption now, somehow using the existence of human clone Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon, returning from Fallen Kingdom) to solve the problem of giant mutant locusts threatening to eat up the world’s grain supply. Did I mention literally none of the plot mechanics in this movie make sense?

The only thing left to admire are the dinosaurs themselves, when they are convincingly rendered anyway. We get the obligatory fight between a tyrannosaur and a “gigantosaurus,” and as always the film finds one way or another to make us cheer for the T. Rex—no matter how many species of theropod are discovered to be bigger, T. Rex still wins the popularity contest. It’s also interesting to see some dinosaurs with actual feathers for once, after years of speculation regarding birds having evolved from them. A couple of “harrowing” sequences feel a lot like people getting chased by a giant chicken.

I was never a big fan of the concept of Chris Pratt’s Owen Grady character “training” velociraptors; that’s a thread of idiocy that runs through this entire trilogy. It largely takes the bite (so to speak) out of the unexplored danger and terror they represented in the first trilogy, and particularly the first Jurassic Park. By the time we get to this movie, we see Grady literally herding Parasaurolophus while on horseback, even lassoing one like a cowboy. That hokiness is the tip of the iceberg here, and it comes very early in the film.

In other words, plainly speaking, Jurassic World Dominion is a mess. It’s an entertaining mess, but still a mess, wasting far too much time on dull, one-note characters when it could be spending more time wowing us with special effects its makers didn’t even bother to perfect. With a bit more time and a modicum of effort, this movie, even being the sixth in the franchise, could have been so much better. The return of original-film cast is little more than stunt casting that ultimately serves only to disappoint. But hey, it did manage to get me to jump about a foot off my chair at least once, and once the film finally gets its shit together and has dinosaurs chasing and/or eating people, it becomes gripping again for a few minutes at a time.

*“Nobody move!” someone shouts, right before . . . everybody moves.*

Overall: C+