Last night, while scrolling through Netflix, one of their “Recently Added” titles was Jurassic Park III. Since I had re-watched Jurassic Park, and then the less enjoyable sequel, The Lost World, my thumb tapped the play button.
Ugh, what have I done.
It starts with a boy and a man (presumed to be his father) going parasailing on Isla Sola, the “Second” JP island that we learnt so much about in The Lost World.
Of course, this goes horribly wrong and they detach from the tether and glide inland where the Dinosaurs are.
of course, parasailing doesn’t get you high enough to go in as far as they were int he early filming, but hey, let’s completely suspend belief…
The next eon is a very slow setup. You see Professor Alan Grant with (whoever Laura Dern played – yeah, that memorable) and kids. You assume that they are married, and it is their family, but oops, her husband comes in. It was just a visit.
Finally, you get the main point. This Couple puts the hard sell on Professor Grant (played by Sam Neil – more about this later) to guide them on an adventure flight around Isla Sola as an anniversary present. Hesitating, and hedging, Prof Grant agrees.
Then you see a scene with some macho mercenaries blowing stuff up, setting the stage for a ground incursion.
Next you see them flying over the island, and Prof Grant playing tour guide. You hear the pilots mention a landing field, and then it’s lights out for Prof Grant. He wakes up and finds them landed, the Mother (played by the truly awful actress Téa Leoni) is using a bullhorn screaming her son’s name. A truly, monumentally bad idea.
Of course, almost instantly one of the mercenaries gets himself killed, and they try to take off to escape, but oops, they crash (how predictable) and are now left to fend for themselves.
Fast forward an hour, and you find yourself screaming at the screen whenever Téa Leoni’s character is on to just eat her, or shoot her in the face. Truly, she has the acting ability of a used KleenexTM.
In the end, you see them find the kid, get out of the jam, stumble through a giant aviary with (you guessed it) pterodactyls that are a bit unfriendly, and finally they defeat a super predator that earlier killed a Tyrannosaur Rex, to be ultimately rescued by the marines.
Yawn. I thought The Lost World was bad, having to force myself to make it to the end, this one had me chugging chardonnay from the bottle to get to the closing credits.
Clearly Sam Harris and William H Macy had some remodel work to do, or some spousal alimony payments to make, as that is the only reason I can imagine either of them accepting a role in this abomination of cinema.
One saving grace, like in the other JP movies, is the CGI effects. Seriously, ditch the story line, dump the shitty actress (Téa Leoni) and just show an hour and forty minutes of the gloriously rendered animation, and I would have shelled out $5 to see it.
