The Lost World: Jurassic Park

There's a lovely quote from the late Lord Attenborough at the end of this film along the lines of "...creatures don't need our help to survive, they need our absence". Never a truer word, but sadly it doesn't really enliven this merchandising booster of a film. The aforementioned gent, "Hammond" has had control of his company wrested away from him and informs chaotician "Malcolm" (Jeff Goldblum) that there's a B-site full of the beasties from the first film and his new board are determined to monetise them all. He has to get there first, and so armed with his sarcastic wit and the savvy Quatermain-esque "Tembo" (Pete Postlethwaite) off he goes. Of course, it being a Spielberg movie, there has to be an annoying child and in this case that's the stowaway "Kelly" (Vanessa Chester) and to complete our line up of charm-free misfits we have Vince Vaughn's "Nick" and Julianne Moore's "Sarah". Thereafter we embark on an whole load of set-piece snatched from the jaws (literally) of death time and time again type scenarios from the real stars of the show, only they have lost the wow factor of their 1993 outing and so now look like pale imitations or something from Ray Harryhausen's reject pile. The story is all too hysterically predictable as it turns out that the venal and the scientific end up going head to head with each other, and the ravenous dinosaurs, before a denouement that is entirely fitting but about ninety minutes later than I wanted it to be. Postlethwaite is the only one here who has anything like a character, in many ways akin to Bob Peck's first time round and there are some astonishingly creative visuals, but this is a sequel that nobody is going to look back upon very fondly.