Jurassic Park III

One wise move by the director and writers of Jurassic Park III (2001; dir. Joe Johnston) is abandoning the pretense of arguing against the dangers of science and commercialism.  The abandonment allows more focus.  It does nothing to improve the film. The story is straightforward.  A young boy with his new stepfather parasails near Isla Sorna, where the InGen corporation in the first Jurassic Park bred the dinosaurs.  But the parasailing goes wrong and the boy ends up lost in the middle of an island full of dinosaurs.  To make a longish story shorter, the boy’s mother and real father launch an expedition to the island to find their son.  They convince the head paleontologist from the first film, Alan Grant (Sam Neill), to come along by offering to fund his research.  What follows is episodic adventure—one encounter with dinosaurs after another.  The really nasty dinosaur of this film is a Spinosaurus.  As usual, the humans make bad decisions that get them into trouble—stealing Velociraptor eggs, for example.  Since the main attractions of these Jurassic films is dinosaurs, this one satisfies the need.  Pteranodons menace various characters.  Velociraptors run amok. Dinosaurs stampede. There’s a huge pile of dinosaur excrement (as in the first film). I can think of nothing further, except that this film had more energy than the second one.

Well, I can say that all the Jurassic films have the same basic plots, and they tend to blur together.  Writing the first draft of this comment, I mistakenly combined elements of the second and third Jurassic films.

And I can say that Bill Macy plays a wealthy man who pays his ex-wife’s way to the island so they can both look for their son.  Macy, usually a good actor, is serviceable in his role, not bad but not great.  It’s difficult to think of him as a masculine go-getter. Tea Leonie as his wife is shrill and hysterical.  She usually plays stronger characters, and she’s irritating here.