JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM (US - 2018) Directed by J.A. Bayona. Written by Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow. Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Justice Smith, Daniella Pineda, Jeff Goldblum, James Cromwell, Toby Jones, Ted Levine, BD Wong, Geraldine Chaplin, Isabella Sermon, Peter Jason, Robert Emms, Charlie Rawes, Kevin Layne, John Schwab. (PG-13, 128 mins) Five films into a 25-year-old blockbuster franchise--let's count this all as one series--and it's understandable that coming up with fresh ideas might be a little difficult. JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM, the follow-up to the 2015 reboot/sequel JURASSIC WORLD, recognizes this, and while it includes numerous visual callbacks and shout-outs to previous installments (including the brief return of an iconic fan favorite), it basically opts for the insane route, with a second-half shift into territory that's so illogical and ludicrous that it can't help but make itself oddly endearing. There's enough sly moments throughout--Bryce Dallas Howard's introduction begins with a close-up of her high heels that's so blatant that it can't be anything but a middle finger to everyone still bitching about her footwear from JURASSIC WORLD--that I'm actually willing to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt. Feel free to argue the plot holes and inconsistencies all you want, but I think they're well aware that they've made what will probably be the dumbest movie of 2018. I can't recall another director harangued more for getting a lucky break than Colin Trevorrow was with JURASSIC WORLD three years ago. Though the directorial reins have been handed off to Guillermo del Toro protege J.A. Bayona (THE ORPHANAGE, THE IMPOSSIBLE, A MONSTER CALLS), Trevorrow remains onboard as a producer and co-writer. With that in mind, it's very much Bayona's film, especially with its improbable second-half location change, but the director seems more than willing to help his franchise predecessor troll the trolls with bits like that high-heel intro, and a later shot where Howard's character arrives on an island and Bayona is sure to spend more time than necessary showing the audience that she's wearing boots.
When a raging volcano threatens the dinosaurs still living on Isla Nublar, the home of the ruins of Jurassic World, Congress must decide whether to intervene and rescue them or allow them to perish once again. Arguing in favor of letting them go extinct is Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who briefly appears at a congressional hearing to repeat the same arguments he leveled at spare-no-expense multi-billionaire John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) a quarter century ago. Congress eventually decides the US will not intervene, but then former Jurassic World PR head and current dinosaur conservationist Claire Dearing (Howard) is summoned to the northern California mansion of Hammond's previously unmentioned business partner Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell). Lockwood is dying and the day-to-day operation of his empire is left largely in the hands of his right-hand man Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), who hires Claire and two of her staffers--paleoveterinarian Zia Rodriguez (Daniella Pineda) and dweeby IT expert Franklin Mills (Justice Smith)--to join a covert operation to rescue numerous dinosaur species and move them to a protected island sanctuary. Also necessary to the team is dino-whisperer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), who reluctantly goes along since one of the creatures they want to rescue is Blue the Velociraptor, with whom he's shared an emotional bond since it was born. Of course, once they're there, they realize they've been tricked (who saw that coming, other than anyone who's seen a previous JURASSIC movie?) and that, unbeknownst to the benevolent Lockwood, Mills' team of contracted mercenaries led by Wheatley (Ted Levine) aren't there to save the dinosaurs, but to gather the most valuable ones to sell to the highest bidder as part of a moneymaking scheme engineered by Mills and wealthy asshole Eversol (Toby Jones). Wheatley's job is to return the dinosaurs not to Lockwood's island sanctuary but to his estate, where a three-story, military-industrial-sized bunker exists underneath to house both the new captures as well as other hybrids, like the new "Indoraptor," engineered by original Jurassic Park scientist-turned-improbable supervillain Dr. Wu (BD Wong). Wu stole some DNA samples from Jurassic World with the intent of selling the newly-created creatures as military weapons, an idea first suggested by Vincent D'Onofrio's character in the previous film.
Once the story moves back to the Lockwood estate, JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM more or less becomes THE OLD JURASSIC HOUSE, with Mills and Eversol holding a dinosaur auction for stock types like Slovenian arms dealers and hulking Russian mobsters, presumably taking a break from buying abducted girls from underground human traffickers before running afoul of Liam Neeson. But instead of Neeson, they're forced to contend with dinosaurs who escape from the holding area on one of the lower bunker levels and proceed to rampage through the mansion. Lockwood's precocious granddaughter Maisie (Isabella Sermon) ends up teaming with Owen and Claire, who are being held captive but break out with the help of a Stegosaur in the adjacent cell as the Indoraptor prototype wreaks havoc and pursues everyone through the mansion. This allows Bayona to showcase his gothic horror/del Toro influence and somehow turn JURASSIC WORLD into an "old dark house" throwback.
There's also a completely batshit revelation about Maisie that goes nowhere and must be a set-up for the inevitable sixth film in the franchise. JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM is a spectacularly dumb movie with dumb people making spectacularly dumb decisions (we've already established that the Indoraptor is super-intelligent and ready for military use, but yeah Wheatley, sneak into its paddock to yank out a tooth for a trophy while it's unconscious--there's no way it's playing possum with you; and why would Jurassic World have been built on an island with a such a large and dangerous active volcano?), but amidst the idiocy, Bayona still brings his own sense of style and a personal touch. There's the gothic interiors of the Lockwood estate, Maisie being a young girl with no friends and largely left to use her vivid imagination (young Sermon recalls both Ana Torrent in THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE and CRIA CUERVOS, and Ivana Baquero in PAN'S LABYRINTH), and the presence of Geraldine Chaplin--a Bayona regular and fixture in Spanish art cinema since her professional collaboration and romantic relationship with filmmaker Carlos Saura in the 1970s--as Iris, Lockwood's nurse and Maisie's nanny. Given his past films and his experience, Bayona has more of a knack for this kind of genre fare than Trevorrow (whose only feature film prior to JURASSIC WORLD was the 2012 Aubrey Plaza indie comedy SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED) demonstrated and despite being an idiotic franchise installment, it still ends up coming across like a film by its director rather than an assembly-line product and audience obligation. JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM is so stupid that it has to be by design, but it seems hesitant to fully commit to its own lunacy or go far enough in fashioning itself as an auto-critique. Sure, Trevorrow and Bayona call out the tireless keyboard warriors with the Howard shoe shots, but they also drop the ball a few times. As much as Maisie sneaks around the labyrinthine Lockwood manor in the dumbwaiter, you'd think it would foreshadow an inevitable moment where a smaller dinosaur hides in it and attacks someone trying to use it to get away. I was all ready for JURASSIC WORLD: DINOS IN THE DUMBWAITER but it failed to transpire. It would've fit right in with a movie that has all manner of dino species milling about inside a loading dock patiently waiting for a door to open so they can get out. I don't think anyone who made this film took it seriously. This is supposed to be a comedy, right?
THE RITUAL (UK - 2017; US release 2018) Directed by David Bruckner. Written by Joe Barton. Cast: Rafe Spall, Arsher Ali, Robert James-Collier, Sam Troughton, Paul Reid, Matthew Needham, Jacob James Beswick, Maria Erwolter, Hilary Reeves, Peter Liddell, Francesca Mula. (Unrated, 94 mins) You can count on zero fingers the number of times "Let's just take the shortcut" ends well in a horror movie, and therein lies the primary dilemma with the Netflix Original film THE RITUAL: you've seen all of it before. Based on a 2011 novel of the same name by Adam Nevill and adapted by Joe Barton (iBOY), the British-made THE RITUAL is the first feature-length film by American director David Bruckner, best known for his contributions to the indie anthologies THE SIGNAL (2007), V/H/S (2012), and SOUTHBOUND (2016). Six months after their buddy Robert (Paul Reid) was killed after walking into a liquor store robbery, four old college friends--Luke (Rafe Spall), Phil (Arsher Ali), Hutch (Robert James-Collier), and Dom (Sam Troughton)--decide to follow-through on Robert's idea for their annual trip by going hiking through the wilderness of Sweden (played here by Romania). It's the usual male-bonding and ballbusting until Dom twists his ankle and they decide to veer from the mapped mountain path and take a shortcut through a dense forest. They quickly stumble on an abandoned VW ("Odd place to park," one of them quips), then trees with strange symbols carved into them, and finally a disemboweled elk carcass perched in the trees. Deciding they've gone too far to turn back and with Dom's ankle getting more difficult to walk on, they forge ahead. Of course, they get lost and a short trip turns into two nights of strange sounds, ominous visions, the discovery of a cabin with items strongly hinting at witchcraft, and other assorted tropes from the BLAIR WITCH manual. Hutch wakes up soaked in his own piss, Phil wanders off and can't remember why, and Luke finds the tree symbols painted on his chest. He's also haunted by a debilitating case of survivor's guilt: he's the one who wanted to buy more booze when the others wanted to call it a night, and he's the one who dragged Robert into the liquor store and then scurried to hide behind a display fixture while his friend was getting his head bashed in.
Though it's based on a relatively recent novel, there's no denying the initial surface similarities, starting with the title, to the 1978 Canadian survivalist cult classic RITUALS, where five doctor friends (led by Hal Holbrook and Lawrence Dane) go on an annual hiking excursion only to be stalked and killed one-by-one by a feral mountain man. Like RITUALS, THE RITUAL has the predicament bringing up long-festering resentments among the old friends, with Luke facing the gradual realization that the others more or less blame him for Robert's death (Dom does so outright). They also fulfill basic archetypes, among them Luke being--at least until Robert's tragic end--the party animal who never really grew up and Dom now the uptight family man who keeps whining that they should've gone to Vegas and is probably exaggerating his ankle injury. But THE RITUAL ultimately takes a more supernatural bent than RITUALS, with the men being stalked by some kind of demonic, horned creature (Bruckner stages a couple of creepily effective bits where the guys are walking through the forest and the creature is camouflaged at the edge of the frame or very deep into the shot) that's worshiped by some deep woods pagans who look like members of a Bucharest community theater troupe that just finished a re-enactment of SOUTHERN COMFORT and are beginning rehearsals for their interpretation of THE WITCH. There's also some WICKER MAN sacrificesploitation that was done to death long before Ben Wheatley ripped it off for KILL LIST. The actors aren't required to do much more than fill stock character roles, though Spall (PROMETHEUS), who resembles a worrisome Ryan Reynolds, seems convincingly anguished and guilt-ridden. Bruckner does a decent job establishing a foreboding sense of dread, but the familiarity, the plodding pacing and the predictable developments all lead to a blandly ho-hum conclusion.
