Review: 'Jurassic World: Dominion' is proof that the franchise should go the way of the dinosaurs

With an inevitability that thuds like the footsteps that announce a dinosaur’s arrival, “Jurassic World: Dominion” hits its action beats with the steady rhythm of a metronome, one that’s likely to lull an audience to sleep. 

This is the sixth movie in the franchise that started with Steven Spielberg’s 1993 action masterpiece “Jurassic Park” — and, if we’re to believe the marketing, the grand finale. If the box office receipts are good, though, I’m sure Universal Pictures could extend the story, though it’s pretty thin and patchy as it is.

The continuation of the last story has publicist-turned-activist Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) as an eco-warrior, sneaking into an illegal breeding facility in Nevada that feeds a growing black market in the dinosaur trade. Meanwhile, her significant other, former dino trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) is in the Sierras rounding up free-range dinosaurs like they’re wild mustangs.

Mostly, Claire and Owen are hiding in a mountain cabin with Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), the teen they rescued from an evil billionaire in the last movie, “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.” Maisie believes she’s a clone of her deceased mother, and enough other people believe it that they go to great lengths to kidnap her and a baby raptor — the child of Owen’s former specimen, Blue.

Those kidnappers work, the movie quickly reveals, for a nasty biotech CEO, Lewis Dodgson, played by Campbell Scott as an awkward combination of Apple’s Tim Cook and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. (His name, I’m guessing, is some sly reference to the real name and nom de plume of the author of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” It’s more thought than went into many other parts of the movie.)

Meanwhile, in the Midwest, farmers are dealing with locusts the size of house cats, and a scientist suspects they’re linked to Dodgson’s nefarious plans, too. That scientist is Dr. Ellie Sattler, still played gloriously by Laura Dern, and she enlists the only other scientist she trusts — yup, Dr. Alan Grant, again played by Sam Neill — to get the goods on Dodgson’s misdeeds by getting into his high-tech research facility in Italy.

It’s only a matter of time before Ellie and Alan cross paths with Claire and Owen. So much time. The movie clocks in just shy of two-and-a-half hours, and a lot of it is action-movie filler. Take, for example, when Claire and Owen try to infiltrate an underground dinosaur bazaar, which leads to a chase scene through Malta that feels so out of place that I kept expecting a “Mission: Impossible” movie to crash into it at the next intersection.

When Ellie/Alan and Claire/Owen do meet up, they also have in their group two more characters, one new and one old. The new one is Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise), a mercenary pilot who grows a heart after seeing Maisie in mid-kidnapping. The old one is Dodgson’s “resident philosopher”: Our chaos-theorizing friend, Dr. Ian Malcolm, again played by Jeff Goldblum.

Director Colin Trevorrow, who directed the first “Jurassic World,” tries to navigate this sprawling, overstuffed story through a world where dinosaurs live everywhere. Trevorrow manages this with a ton of computer animation and some funky animatronic creatures. Some of the effects look sharp, but there’s one sequence that’s so poorly lit and shot that it feels like the characters were walking through an attraction at Universal Studios that’s still going through beta testing.

There is, I will admit, an electric thrill seeing Dern and Neill, the stars of the original “Jurassic Park,” reunite for the first time in two decades. (They appeared in “Jurassic Park III” back in 2001, but Dern’s scene was essentially a cameo.) Most of that is because Dern, who was 26 when the original hit theaters, remains one of the most fascinating actors to watch — even when she’s trying to avoid giant locusts or a clinch with Neill’s Grant. Dern’s best chemistry is with Howard, making manifest Dern’s “woman inherits the earth” line from the original.

Annoyingly, Trevorrow and co-screenwriter Emily Carmichael get bogged down by pumping the fan service into every corner of the story. Both B.D. Wong’s geneticist and the infamous Barbasol can makes a comeback, among other moments that will make undemanding fans go “oh, I get it.” But, at the same time, they take the only truly interesting development of the last three movies — the truth of Maisie’s existence — and lose their nerve.

The moment that solidifies how bereft of ideas “Jurassic World: Dominion” is comes when Goldblum’s Ian finally meets Pratt’s Owen and realizes that Owen worked at that expanded amusement park. “Jurassic World? Not a fan,” Ian says, as if to beat the audience from saying the same thing about this movie.

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‘Jurassic World: Dominion’

★★

Opens Friday, June 10, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action, some violence and language. Running time: 146 minutes.