Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: Enjoyable, mindless, light-hearted, bone crunching, blood splattering fun.  Sure, a lot of it doesn’t make much sense, but so what?

Dinosaurs still rule the box office.  And rightfully so.  Having learned none of the lessons from the Jurassic Park theme park, now we have Jurassic World.  Bigger.  Better.  More dinosaur-y.  What could possibly go wrong?  A lot.

There is lots of stupid in this movie, but it washes over you like a warm Caribbean wave.  You’re too busy looking at all the pretty to notice the jellyfish.  Sure, the super-intelligent genetically modified super-dinosaur just happens to exhibit all of its super-intelligence at precisely the right moment.  Sure, the genetic makeup of said dinosaur is top-secret for vague and pointless reasons.  Sure, an island with a massive tourist attraction would have more than one helicopter and one pilot.  Sure, you probably wouldn’t allow kayakers down a lazy river full of dinosaurs no matter how docile they are.  Sure, the setup for the inevitable sequel is mind numbingly silly yet awesome sounding.  Ignore it.  Feel the waves.  They’re more plentiful than the jellyfish.

Chris Pratt?  Awesome.  I was a little worried after seeing the coming attractions.  They made him seem wooden and outside of his environment.  That did not translate to the movie at all.  Chris Pratt plays Starlord, I mean Andy Dwyer, I mean Owen, an affable dinosaur trainer who is teaching a pack of velociraptors to hunt on his command.  Ok, so Chris Pratt doesn’t really have a lot of range beyond affable.  He plays it so well, though, and you can do a lot with affable.  He is joined by Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), the stick in the mud who both runs the park and is watching her two nephews who inevitably get sucked into the middle of all the dinosaur mayhem.  Pratt and Howard have some decent chemistry with each other as an opposites-attract couple.

I don’t think “Jurassic World” lives up to its groundbreaking forefather “Jurassic Park”, but it is a fun ride for what it is.  It’s a lot of rehash with a few new ideas thrown it and that all makes it just entertaining enough to make it a movie worth seeing.  With its record-breaking success, expect to see a whole lot more dinosaurs in the future.  The dino-wars are not far in the future.