Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One: A Review - Assume the Missionary Position

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. Compared to all the other vapid junk recently available at the cineplex, this is the best of the vapid junk. If you love Mission Impossible movies you will love this one. If you loathe those movies or Tom Cruise, you’ll definitely hate this one.

I can say without reservation that Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh film in the Tom Cruise starring Mission: Impossible franchise, is most definitely a movie…but whether it’s a good one or not is a much more complicated question.

Mission: Impossible is one of the more confounding film franchises in cinema history. Astoundingly, it has been around for nearly thirty years (Cruise was 33 on the first one and is 61 now!), and for the majority of those years it has been considered pretty forgettable, second tier entertainment at best.

Oddly, the films have become more popular as the series has gone along. The films always made money…but they never made that much money. The first three films generated a respectable but not earth-shattering $457M, $546M and $398M respectively at the box office…but with budgets of $80M, $125 and $150m.  Movies four, five and six made a much more impressive $694M, $682M and $791M respectively with budgets of $145M, $150m and $175m.

In addition, fans and critics were lukewarm at best on the first three films, with Rotten Tomato scores of 66 critical/71 audience, 56 critical/42 audience and 71 critical/69 audience respectively for films one, two and three. Interestingly enough, starting with the fourth film, both critics and audience’s love for the films has grown exponentially, with the RT scores being 93 critical/76 audience, 94 critical/87 audience and 97 critical/88 audience for films four, five and six respectively.

That Mission: Impossible survived its first three middling movies to become a respectable franchise is pretty astonishing. It would not have been surprising if, after any of the first three films, the studio (and Cruise) just decided to close up the Mission: Impossible shop.

But what happened instead is that the films stopped being films and transformed into the Tom Cruise Stunt Experience. Starting with the fourth movie, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, the franchise’s focus became less about the stories it told and more about the insane stunts Tom Cruise performed in each movie. For example, in Ghost Protocol, Cruise climbed the tallest skyscraper in the world – the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. The marketing around the film was all about Cruise’s insane stunt work, and not about the film itself.

That approach has only grown more vociferous since, with the focus of the Mission: Impossible films being Cruise’s increasingly daring stunt work as opposed to…I don’t know…his acting or the story. There was the famous scene in Rogue Nation (film #5) where Cruise hung off of an Airbus as it took off and flew, and then the HALO parachute jump into Paris in M:I 6.

The marketing approach of highlighting Cruise’s death-defying stunts has worked incredibly well, even when those stunts don’t look particularly good on-screen – like the HALO jump. But the point of the stunts isn’t for them to look good but to distract people from the actual movie by making them mutter in amazement, “wow, Tom Cruise just did that crazy thing!”

The newest film, Dead Reckoning Part One, written and directed by longtime Tom Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, is no exception. The marketing around the movie is all about Cruise’s motorcycle/parachute jump off a cliff. The stunt is no doubt impressive even if it doesn’t exactly visually translate very well once Cruise and his motorcycle leave terra firma.

The rest of the movie is…fine…I guess. I mean it’s good for a Mission: Impossible movie, considering the franchise that has always been a parody of itself. Yes, it’s utterly ridiculous and absolutely absurd, but I did find myself mostly engaged for the rather bloated two-hour and forty-five-minute runtime, but I also found myself pondering a more existential question in the wake of watching Dead Reckoning, namely is this movie now considered good because everything else is so bad?

In my case, the last two movies I saw before this were The Flash and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Those two movies were, like most of the movies I’ve seen over the last few years, dreadfully bad, and Dead Reckoning is much better than them, but that doesn’t necessarily make it good.

My theory is this…it seems to me that cinema in particular, and our culture in general, has been decaying for the last decade, and in precipitous decline for the past four years, so much so that what was once second-tier, forgettable garbage like Mission: Impossible, is now considered elite franchise filmmaking.

This is a round-about way of saying that objectively, Dead Reckoning isn’t a good movie, but in the context of the shit filling the cineplex these days, it is entertaining and enjoyable.

What makes it entertaining and enjoyable? Well, first off, it makes the rather rudimentary and obvious decision, which Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny ignored, to fill itself to the brim with a cavalcade of sumptuous eye-candy.

The eye-candy comes in the gorgeous form of Hayley Atwell, Vanessa Kirby and Rebecca Ferguson. These three women are not only attractive, they’re very talented. Contrast that to Indiana Jones which featured only one woman prominently, and that was the ungainly Phoebe Waller-Bridge, a sub-par and rather unattractive actress.

Hayley Atwell is the best thing about Dead Reckoning and it isn’t even close. Atwell is charismatic, compelling and fun as Grace, the pickpocket/con artist who gives Cruise’s Ethan Hunt a run for his money. Atwell is so appealing she’s actually able to make it seem like she and the dead-eyed Cruise have chemistry…which brings to mind the Rolling Stones lyric from Start Me Up – “you made a dead man come!”

Vanessa Kirby is back as Alana - the White Widow, a sexy arms dealer and she is, as always, undeniably magnetic. Kirby smolders with a palpable dynamism that jumps off the screen. Kirby needs to be a bigger movie star than she already is.

Rebecca Ferguson is the rogue MI 6 agent Ilsa Faust who may or may not have stolen Ethan Hunt’s heart. Ferguson is actually quite good in this enigmatic role, which is no easy task opposite the often lifeless Cruise.

As for the eye-candy for women…well…sorry ladies…all you get is Tom Cruise. Cruise is in absolutely incredible shape but his boyish good looks are long gone and left in their place is a sort of strangely puffy, post-plastic surgery face that always looks just a bit off.

Cruise doesn’t so much act in these movies, as play-act, and it can be pretty cringe-worthy. Cruise is undeniably one of the biggest movie stars of the last forty years, but he is not a particularly good actor, and he lacks a physical presence and dynamism that you’d expect to see from someone of his standing.

Cruise’s attempts at being sincere always feel manufactured and his attempts at being tough feel hollow. But on the bright side we at least get to see Cruise run in this movie…a lot. Cruise’s Mission Impossible running is legendary to the point of being hysterical. It never fails to make me laugh when Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, busts out his hyper-focused sprint. That all of these movies feature numerous scenes of Cruise sprinting, and they all hold those shots of him running for roughly twenty to thirty seconds too long, is one of the more puzzling things about them. Are Cruise and the filmmakers in on the joke or do they think this is really awesome? Who knows?

For a franchise that has been around now for seven movies and nearly thirty years, it should come as no surprise that it is cannibalizing itself. For example, in Dead Reckoning Ethan Hunt is once again facing a villain intent on destroying the world. And once again this villain, a sentient AI named the Entity (no I’m not joking), is so omnipotent that it predicts what all of the Mission Impossible guys and gals will do before they do it…which leads to dialogue about ‘should we do this? – But the Entity KNOWS we’ll do it!!’ This is all very reminiscent of The Syndicate and The Apostles and every other villain in recent MI history.

Dead Reckoning is also seemingly stealing/paying tribute to other films including earlier Mission Impossible ones. For instance, there is yet another sandstorm featured prominently in a sequence in this movie, which also occurred in Ghost Protocol. There’s also a climactic train sequence, which is similar to the one from the very first M:I movie.

Other movies are borrowed from as well, like The Hunt for Red October and Jurassic Park 2. It is never clear if these are a result of homage or creative bankruptcy.

Ultimately, all Mission: Impossible films feel like ego-events with Tom Cruise playing messiah. Dead Reckoning is no exception. That said, it is much better and more entertaining than the vast majority of junk I’ve had to sit through in recent years, including Indiana Jones, The Flash and even everyone’s favorite piece of rancid pop culture shit Top Gun: Maverick.

If you liked any or all of those movies (God, help us!), you’ll think Dead Reckoning is Citizen Kane mixed with The Godfather. If, like me, you loathed those movies, you’ll find Dead Reckoning, filled with pretty woman and beautiful locations, to be a passable piece of franchise entertainment in a culture deeply enmeshed in a seemingly endless entertainment drought.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

The Fabelmans: A Review - The Naked Truth Is That Emperor Spielberg Has No Clothes

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A terrible, self-indulgent, truly awful film that features poor performances, an abysmal script, and dreadful direction.

This past year has been a boon for self-indulgent film directors and a bane for movie audiences, as auteurs have shat out a bevy of sub-par autobiographical movies about their childhoods and the magic of cinema.

First there was Alejandro G. Inarritu’s atrocious Bardo, followed quickly by James Gray’s artistically anemic Armageddon Time, and then there was Sam Mendes’ universally panned Empire of Light (which, to be fair, is less blatantly autobiographical), and finally there is Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans.

I’ve seen all of the above except for Empire of Light. What has been alarming is that each of these films I have seen has gotten progressively worse than the one I saw before it. Armageddon Time is shlocky, politically correct garbage, but Bardo is simply an astonishing cinematic atrocity. Bardo is supremely awful, but it’s at least visually and narratively ambitious if not audacious, which is in stark contrast to Spielberg’s newest flatulent film The Fabelmans.

The Fabelmans describes itself as a coming-of-age drama, co-written by Spielberg and Tony Kushner, that chronicles aspiring filmmaker Sam Fabelman (a stand in for Spielberg), a precocious young man in love with moviemaking, as he navigates his childhood and teen years growing up with a scientific father, Burt, and an artistic mother, Mitzi.

The Fabelmans is easily the worst of the Spielberg’s late-stage movies, which is quite an accomplishment considering the garbage he’s churned out over the last twenty years or so. This film is, quite frankly, so bad as to be an utter embarrassment. I watched a screener of the movie with my wife and we laughed out loud numerous times AT the movie, but never with it. The movie is such an amateurish, after-school special level production that we literally stopped it on multiple occasions and turned to each other and asked “what the fuck?”

At one point in the film, aspiring director Sam Fabelman is watching the footage of a movie he’s shot with his Boy Scout troop, and he shakes his head and mutters to himself in disappointment, “Fake. Totally fake.” Too bad Spielberg didn’t have the same discerning eye at 76 that he did when he was 14 as The Fabelmans rings so egregiously phony that I actually pondered “how could Spielberg watch this and agree to release it?”

There are so many scenes and sequences in this movie that are simply mindboggling for how appallingly awful they are. Just when you think the worst scene is behind you a new cinematic and dramatic atrocity steps in to take its place.

There’s the dinner scene which is staged and acted like the worst high school play you’ve ever had the displeasure to endure. Then there’s the masturbatorial scenes where audiences of Boy Scouts and family are overly amazed to the point of ecstasy at Sam Fabelman’s “brilliant” movies that aren’t brilliant. And then there’s the ultimate cringe worthy scene where Mitzi Fabelman does her best Corky St. Clair “Penny for your Thoughts” from Waiting for Guffman imitation as she “dances” in a see-through nightgown in front of a campfire and car headlights while on a camping trip.

Then there’s the scene where Sam edits the footage of this camping trip and discovers a family “secret”, which is shot like it’s from a bad pre-teen show on Disney Channel. Then there’s the scene where family friend Benny gives a camera to Sam as a going away present, which is staged with all the grace of monkeys having a shit fight at the zoo. Then there’s the scenes of gay, neo-Nazi, Schindler’s List wannabe, anti-Semites who bully Sam in high school which all feel like they’re from the worst episode of Happy Days you’ve ever seen. And on and on and on.

There is literally only one scene in the entire film which crackles with any life or dynamism, and that’s the last scene of the movie. This exuberant scene only goes to remind how badly mismanaged the dismal and dull preceding two-hours and thirty-minutes truly were.

Spielberg has always been addled by his addiction to a saccharine sentimentality, and The Fabelmans is no exception, except here the sentimentality is, to reference another Christopher Guest movie, turned all the way up to 11. Unfortunately, this sentimentality has blinded Spielberg to the stark lack of craftsmanship across the board in this movie.

John Williams score and Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography are banal, underwhelming and shockingly second-rate. Tony Kushner’s (and Spielberg’s) script is so inelegant and so lacking in cohesiveness and humanity, as to be cinematic malpractice.

Speaking of cinematic malpractice, there’s a scene in the film where Judd Hirsch, who compellingly plays a sort of crazy-genius grand-uncle, is spewing contrived pieces of wisdom to young Sammy Fabelman, and yet throughout the scene you can see his mic pack bulging through his wife beater t-shirt. This is a $40 million movie, not some $1,200 student film…how the hell does that level of shoddiness make it to the screen?

The performances are just as abominable as the rest of the work on the film.

Michelle Williams is an actress I like, but her Mitzi, featuring a haircut from hell, is one of the most hollow, disingenuous and grating pieces of acting I’ve witnessed in recent years. Everything is so mannered and so contrived that it feels like watching a toddler ham it up in grandma’s clothes to entertain the family after rowdy Thanksgiving dinner.

Paul Dano is an actor I greatly admire, but his performance in The Fabelmans is so vacuous and devoid of any inner life or intention as to be remarkable. Dano is dead-eyed as he mechanically utters his lines like he’s auditioning for a job at either a wax museum or a mausoleum.

And just when you thought the acting couldn’t get any worse…Seth Rogan shows up. Good lord. Seth Rogan is to acting what a dirty diaper is to ambience.

On top of all the bad acting, every character is extremely unlikable (the same is true in Armageddon Time and Bardo…why are director’s families so repulsive?). Early in the film, Mitzi, for some incoherent reason, drives the family towards a tornado and all I could do was hope that they would all be thrown miles away and end up a red stain on the dashboard. Once that didn’t happen, I was left praying for a pack of coyotes to come along and maul them all in their sleep, or a gas leak or a septic tank explosion, to take them out and put me out of my misery.

There’s also a very strange and frankly very ugly strain of anti-Christian sentiment that rears its head about two thirds of the way through the film. I’m not someone who ever cares about this sort of thing but Spielberg goes out of his way to demean and belittle a Christian character in the movie, and explicitly mock her religion. The treatment of this girl and her Christianity is nasty and mean-spirited and totally out of place with the tone of the rest of the film. It’s the equivalent of what the gay Neo-Nazi anti-Semites do to the Sam Fabelman character when they call him ‘Bagelman’ and demand he apologize for killing Christ. In other words, it isn’t clever or insightful or amusing, it’s just vicious and small-minded. That Spielberg, who is allegedly a man of faith (he’s made quite a show of his connection to Judaism over the years), would demean, disparage and denigrate the lone character of a differing faith in his film and gleefully embrace this repellent but culturally acceptable prejudice, speaks volumes about his lack of character.

The Fabelmans has been a major box office flop, as it has only made $25 million against a $40 million budget. But Spielberg didn’t make this movie to make money, he made it to win an Oscar….and he might just succeed.

It's a testament to Spielberg’s iron grip on Hollywood that this movie, this dreadful, no-good, really bad movie, is nominated for Best Picture and Best Director, as well as Best Actress (Michelle Williams) and Best Supporting Actor (Judd Hirsch).

Spielberg’s power over Hollywood and the lack of intellectual integrity among critics, also accounts for why the movie is adored by most critics (92% critical score Rotten Tomatoes). But don’t be fooled by the vacuous opinions of these sycophants and philistines.

The reality is that the once great Emperor Spielberg, who gave us cinematic marvels like Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List and Catch Me If You Can, has no clothes.

The naked truth for all to see but few will admit, is that The Fabelmans is an embarrassing and humiliating failure of a film. To claim otherwise is either dishonest, delusional, or both.

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 71 - Jurassic World: Dominion

On this episode, Barry and I run for our lives from the dino-disaster that is Jurassic World: Dominion. Topics discussed include Jaws/Jurassic Park and the primordial fear of moving down the food chain, the mystery of awful writer/director Colin Trevorrow's career, and the sizzling sexual chemistry between Chris Pratt and Blue the Raptor.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 71 - Jurassic World: Dominion

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Jurassic World: Dominion - A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This dismal dino-disaster has all the charm of a rotting Brachiosaurus carcass left out in the hot Malta sun.

Ever since Steven Spielberg busted the box office with his signature Spielbergian grandiosity and grating emotional simplicity in the original Jurassic Park back in 1993, the franchise has been an exercise in diminishing returns, with each successive movie declining precipitously in terms of cinematic quality.

Jurassic World: Dominion, which opened in theatres June 10 and stars Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Neil, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, is the third movie in the Jurassic World trilogy and the sixth cinematic dino-venture, and allegedly the final installment, in the nearly thirty-year-old Jurassic Park franchise, and it feels distinctively like hitting bottom.

Beating the Jurassic Park dead dinosaur to dust has been a profitable exercise for Executive Producer Spielberg and his corporate cohorts at Universal over the years, but this most recent miserable meteor strike of a movie should only be warmly welcomed because it seems to signal a Jurassic franchise extinction-level event.

The good news is that Jurassic World: Dominion has a plot, the bad news is that the parts of it that aren’t completely incoherent are utterly absurd. The globe spanning story features, of course, dinosaurs on the loose, an evil bio-tech company with the rather on the nose name of Bio-Syn (subtle), as well as a beautiful teenage clone with a posh British accent.

The plot and its atmospherics are so ridiculous and stereotypically “Hollywood” they sound like something bandied about in a rejected Entourage script.

The same is true of the second-generation Hollywood royalty populating the cast, with Bryce Dallas Howard (Ron Howard’s daughter), Laura Dern (Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd’s daughter) and Campbell Scott (George C. Scott’s son) headlining the nepotism all-star team dreamed up in the halls of power at some nefarious Tinsel Town talent agency.

Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, the leads from the original Jurassic Park, reprise their rather forgettable roles in Dominion and mix and mingle with the equally forgettable characters from the Jurassic World trilogy.

I suppose this call back to the original is an attempt at nostalgia, but it’s a fruitless one since no one gives a flying fuck about these drab and dismal characters. The only reason to watch a Jurassic Park movie is to see dinosaurs roam the earth and wreak havoc, not to see Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum collect a paycheck.

The same is true of Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. Pratt is sort of a C+ level movie star and is charming enough, and Howard is an equally pleasant on-screen presence and is easy on the eyes, but let’s not kid ourselves, no one would care if they, or Neill, Dern and Goldblum were just another high-priced dino-meal at the Jurassic Park café.

In fact, if T-Rex, or one of his even larger dinosaur co-stars, were to devour one of these mindless Hollywood meat puppets, it would make the movie delightfully worthwhile. But similar to Top Gun: Maverick, another current corporate money grab, no main character is allowed to die in this movie for some apparent reason.

This rather sterile creative decision is so egregious as to be criminal. If this is indeed the last installment of the franchise, and God knows it should be, then writer/director Colin Trevorrow should’ve used that as a blessed opportunity to shamelessly milk this bloated brontosaurus for all the drama it’s worth.

Why not have Neill’s Dr. Grant nobly sacrifice himself to save his beloved Dr. Sattler (Laura Dern) and then have Sattler eventually end up with his nemesis, Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm? Or have Dr. Ian Malcolm die in a blaze of over-acting glory to save the rest of the cast? Or have Chris Pratt get killed by his best friend/part-time lover Blue the Raptor? Hell…why not have Chris Pratt, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum all get eaten and then Bryce Dallas Howard and Laura Dern can raise the cloned teenage girl in a sort of “my two mommies/down with the patriarchy!” type of situation?

Speaking of which, the usual cultural politics of the day are on display in Dominion, with cartoon cutout minority characters, namely, Bio-Syn communications director Ramsey Cole (an appealing Mamoudou Athie) and ex-Air Force pilot and current sassy black lesbian Kayla Watts (a luminous DeWanda Wise), being the ones who save the day and everybody else’s pasty white asses. How patronizingly progressive or progressively patronizing, whichever you prefer.

Writer/director Trevorrow, who wrote all three of the Jurassic World movies and directed two of the three, has proven himself to be the poster-child for Hollywood hackery.

His movies seem like two-hour trailers for themselves, as there’s just no “there” there. As evidenced by Jurassic World: Dominion, Trevorrow’s stories are convoluted, his dialogue utterly atrocious, and his action sequences often derivative.

Another striking thing to me is that somehow the dinosaurs from the original Jurassic Park thirty years ago, look considerably better and more realistic than the ones in Jurassic World: Dominion. That is probably a function of cost-cutting and just plain old not giving a shit, but for whatever reason it occurs, it’s entirely unforgivable.

Jurassic Park movies are meant to be entertaining, mildly elevated monster movies, with a scintilla of sub-text about philosophy and science bubbling underneath the spectacle of dino-carnage. But what has ended up happening is that the films have been marketed more and more toward younger kids and also become more and more silly while also becoming more and more violent and dark. This dichotomy has made for a strange combination as the movies now seem much too scary for kids and much too stupid for grown-ups.

The bottom line is that the tortuously dopey Jurassic World: Dominion is a typical piece of mindless Hollywood franchise filmmaking that is devoid of both quality and interest. The once ferocious T-Rex from Spielberg’s startling 1993 original has been reduced to be nothing more than a creatively comatose, cold-blooded cash cow, and is definitely not worth your valuable time or hard-earned money.

©2022

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom - A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars                  

Popcorn Curve Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. No reason to see this movie. Another regurgitated rehash of a retread from the creatively bankrupt studios of Hollywood.       

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, written by Colin Treverrow and Derek Connolly and directed by J.A. Bayona, is the story of genetically resurrected dinosaurs being rescued from their now shuttered island park in order to save them from extinction via a volcanic eruption. The film stars Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard with supporting performances from Rafe Spall, Justice Smith, Daneilla Pineda and James Cromwell.

I, like most children big and small, like dinosaurs…I admit it. Now, do I like them enough to pay $12.50 to see them run around and cause havoc on the big screen? No. But do I like them enough to use MoviePass to basically see dinosaur inspired chaos for free? You betcha. It was in this state of mind that I ventured out to see Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom which is the fifth film of the Jurassic Park series and the second film in the Jurassic World trilogy which began in 2015 with the film Jurassic World. The good thing is, if you have seen any of the other four Jurassic Park films, you have basically seen this one. The stories in this franchise are all, ironically enough, clones of one another, with characters making idiotic or nefarious decisions that lead to a plethora of carnage when dinosaurs are unleashed and end up behaving like…well...dinosaurs. 

In regards to the specifics of Fallen Kingdom, the good news is...that Chris Pratt has developed into a totally serviceable movie star, sort of a poor man's Harrison Ford. Another bit of good news is that Bryce Dallas Howard is an appealing screen presence who is able to carry the weight of a big budget action movie, which is no small feat. That is the end of the good news section of this review. 

Now for the bad news…writers Colin Treverrow and Derek Connolly, who wrote Jurassic World (2015) and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom as well as the next Jurassic World film, are maybe the worst screenwriters working in Hollywood. Treverrow and Connolly are remarkably inept at writing a cogent and clear narrative, instead deciding to embrace a multitude of flaccid story lines that completely lack originality and drama . Treverrow and Connolly are so devoid of talent, skill and craft that one has to wonder what compromising material they have on Hollywood big wigs that allows them to have careers…it must be a substantial bit of dirt considering how awful they are at what they do.

The screenwriter's failures are only overshadowed by another bit of bad news…director J.A. Bayona's inability to piece together an even remotely coherent film. Bayona's failure is even more disturbing as unlike his screenwriters, he at least showed some signs of promise with his film A Monster Calls (2016). Sadly, with Fallen Kingdom, Bayona churns out a piece of ham-fisted garbage that is riddled with such egregiously poor editing that it is stunning. Bayona's decidedly anemic storytelling combined with Treverrow and Connolly's wretched script, make for a predictable and dull cinematic affair. 

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is basically a satire of itself, cannibalizing other better films like Raiders of the Lost Ark or every other Jurassic Park film, for second rate thrills that are so familiar as to breed contempt. For example, Fallen Kingdom repeatedly tries to recreate Spielberg's original iconic scene from Jurassic Park where a T-Rex gives a dominant roar to proclaim his resurgence…so much so that I felt like I was watching auditions for a new MGM lion. Then there is Chris Pratt going full Indiana Jones when he runs away from a volcanic explosion with dinosaurs chasing him just like Indy ran down a hill with natives chasing him in Spielberg's original action/adventure gem…the shots are nearly identical. 

The writing, directing and editing aren't the only things wrong with Fallen Kingdom, it also boasts some truly atrocious acting. James Cromwell plays some old guy in a wheelchair, but his legs aren't the only thing that don't work as Cromwell's dreadful British accent falls in and out so much I thought he was playing a schizophrenic with multiple personalities. Cromwell has been around forever and is a consistently terrible actor, but he has been doing it for so long we've just become accustomed to his awfulness. 

Speaking of terrible acting, Rafe Spall plays some other guy that no one cares about or believes and is totally forgettable in every single way. His compatriot Toby Jones plays what I assume is supposed to be an evil auctioneer or something which is exactly as moronic as it sounds. You could've cast cardboard cutouts and had stage hands dressed in black bodysuits move them around and you would've gotten more genuine performances.

To no one's joy but his own, Jeff Goldblum took time away from his work on apartment.com commercials to reprise his role of Dr. Ian Malcolm from earlier Jurassic Park films. Goldblum is a total mystery, why he has a career and people think he is interesting is beyond me. His performance in Fallen Kingdom is noteworthy though mainly because he is able to maintain continuity by meticulously repeating his earlier abysmal performances from the other Jurassic Park films. The only person who thinks Jeff Goldblum is giving an intriguing performance in this film is Jeff Goldblum…and he is damn sure of it.

Fallen Kingdom is so riddled with inconsistencies and illogic the film couldn't help but collapse upon itself. For instance, the prices for the dinosaurs, of which there are only a dozen or so left on the planet, run around $10 million each…which will buy you a decent, but not extravagant, house here in Los Angeles. When a four bedroom, three bath house costs as much as a Tricerotops, you know our economy has gone to hell in a hand basket. The economics of Fallen Kingdom are obviously as illogical as the characters actions and as shitty as the storytelling. 

Another equally inane thing about Fallen Kingdom are its politics. As long time readers know, my Historical Wave Theory posits that the arts, and in this day and age cinema in particular, can be leading indicators for the mood of the collective unconscious. With that said, there are films that are lagging indicators…and Fallen Kingdom falls into that category at least as far as its surface/conscious politics are concerned (the dominant color scheme of the film, green - both dark and light - and vibrant orange, and the archetypal narrative at the foundational core of the film, actually say a great deal more about what's happening in the collective unconscious than the movie's politics, but that is a very long discussion for another day) . 

Fallen Kingdom's politics are decidedly neo-liberal, with government seen as a benign or benevolent force. Every villain in the film is a White man, and one of them even utters the Trumpian phrase "what a nasty woman" in regards to the film's feminist character Zia, who is quick to say she is a doctor and is not as delicate as men think. In one scene, Zia's actions (I won't describe them in order to avoid spoilers - but her particular act is important to note for its symbolic meaning) lead to numerous villains getting their comeuppance, all of whom are the vilest of creatures…the generic White male. 

Keeping with the lagging indicator theme, there is one bad guy singled out who is a Russian oligarch. He is the baddest of the bad guys, no doubt because he is Russian and we all know Russians are pure evil…and may not even be human they are so barbaric…at least that's what Hollywood has taught me. The Russian bad guy, the Trumpian dino-hunter and the generic woman-hating, patriarch enforcing White men are all such obvious and blatant bits of pandering it is cringe-worthy.

It is interesting to note that Steven Spielberg is Executive Producer of Fallen Kingdom, and he was also director of last year's The Post, another lagging indicator film that was well behind the times in regard to the collective unconscious. It is telling that Spielberg is no longer in touch with the collective unconscious, but that is the fate of all propagandists who try and control collective consciousness rather than connect with it. By trying to manage and manipulate audiences or to "give them what they want", Spielberg has detached from his artistic muse which is how he connected with the collective unconscious in the first place. Spielberg's quest to manipulate audiences has thus rendered his films, even those he only produces, as being culturally irrelevant at best, and at worst insidious propaganda. 

In conclusion, even if you are looking for just a little bit of summer movie escapist fun, Fallen World would seem to fall short on that account too as at the screening I attended, more than half of the audience checked their phones periodically throughout the movie, so much so that it looked like random fireflies lighting up on a hot summer's night. Apparently these folks (many of whom were retirees and middle aged people, not the usual cell phone suspects - teenagers and millennials) wanted to escape from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom as much the dinosaurs wanted to get off that volcanic island. Me…even though I dig me some dinosaurs, I would rather be stuck in hot lava with a T-Rex chomping on my groin than ever watch another Jurassic World movie. 

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is a repetitive, moronic mess of a movie that's only justification for existing is as a commercial for the accompanying Universal amusement park ride and the inevitable mindless sequels coming in its wake, therefore…there is absolutely no need to see it…ever.

©2018