Showing posts with label ★★. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ★★. Show all posts
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
★ ★
After half an hour of excruciating exposition, we finally arrive at some dino-action... and my goodness its boring. Action-wise 'The Lost World' is a humourless retread of the original, with cheaper looking CGI and animatronics. Plot-wise its a carelessly assembled jumble of cliches and charicatures. Pressured into writing a sequel-novel in the hopes of repeating 'Jurassic Park's success, Crichton relies on half-hearted 'King Kong'-isms, but never manages to throw any new ideas into the mix. Goldblum looks embarassed to be here, desperately trying to wring some humour out of an uncharismatic script. By the time the T-Rex is stomping through San Diego, its too late: 100 minutes in is too late for a film to get interesting. This is pure money-centric cinema, which has more in common artistically with Jaws 3D than with Jaws. Spielberg's worst film.
Escape From New York (1981)
★ ★ John Carpenter mounts an exciting premise, and then runs out of ideas. Perhaps given a higher budget, 'Escape From New York' might be able to overcome its non-plot with visual dazzle. As it is, the film lifelessly flops around impersonating 'Blade Runner', 'The Warriors' and 'Mad Max', sadly never managing to be as interesting as the first 15 minutes suggest that it could have been.
Predator 2 (1990)
★ ★ After an hour of dull and unecessary 'Robocop'-esque near-future cops vs. drug gangs non-action (censor-appeasing cuts have excised all the gore), the film finally hits on a reasonably entertaining urban equivalent of the original's mano-a-mano guerilla death-match.
The script, acting and direction are limp. 'Aliens' is plagiarised, and the Predator develops a potty-mouth. Scwarzenegger was wise to choose 'Terminator 2' over this crap.
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