Directed by Joe Johnston
Written by Peter Buchman, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor
Starring Sam Niell as Allen Grant, Tea Lioni as Amanda Kirby, William H. Macy as Paul Kirby and Alessondro Nivola as Billy Brennan

Jonny Sez...

If you look in the dictionary under "Bad Movie" you won't find Jurassic Park 3. However, if you turn a few pages to the C section and look up "Crimes Against Cinema" there, nestled snuggly between Pearl Harbor and The Island of Dr. Moreau you will find Jurassic Park III. To shortly summarize, at thirty-nine minutes into the movie, I realized that we had only seen three dinosaurs. The movie is only an hour and twenty-four minutes long! And it is not like Jaws, where the presence of the shark is strongly hinted at. Up until about a half hour in, they aren't even on the fucking island. In the DVD Extras, there is a thing called Dinosaur Turntables. That is way better than the movie. What it is, is computer models for all the Dinosaurs used in the film that spin around as if they are sitting on turntables. That part is cool. Other than that, all you realize is that Joe Johnston who directs Jurassic Park III, not only directed, but also took credit for directing Honey I Shrunk the Kids.

Note to that one guy in Delaware who reads the shit I write: Jason, if you are going to make a movie about Dinosaurs, put some fucking Dinosaurs in it! Especially if you are claiming to be part of a series of movies that for all their faults, had fucking Dinosaurs in practically every scene. Don't waste my time with a fucking plot. Obviously, that moron Dr. Grant (Sam Neill) is going to go back to the island. They should have just started the movie on the fucking Island with Dr. Grant saying, "I knew this was a bad idea" just as a whole pack of tyrannosaurs eats all the other asshole actors up. Then, as a tyrannosaur eats the Dr.'s legs he could yell, "You would have never done this to Goldblum?" And then he would die and the rest of the movie would just be Dinosaurs stomping around and killing each other. No fucking people. Oh, would that be a great Dinosaur movie! Instead, we get a watered down version of the sequel to the original where the only interesting thing on the screen is William H. Macy and he is only interesting because you wonder the entire movie why he did this fucking pile of shit. Of course, my friend Becky pointed out that they probably gave him $5,000,000. Hell, they probably gave Laura Dern half a million for the two minutes she was on screen. On screen without dinosaurs, I might add. As for the other people who are in this movie, I guess they just really wanted a vehicle that showed off their sprinting ability. The dinosaurs do look good. I will not take that away from this movie. Everything else, though, is lowly and retarded. To the point where I couldn't even enjoy the dinosaurs.

The whole story is so contrived--by contrived I mean dumb--that it only makes you realize how terrible Hollywood is when all it concentrates on is MONEY. Especially when it is simply cashing in on a tired premise with yet another lousy sequel. Here are some more suck-ass things about this suck-ass movie. Building a bigger dinosaur: Somehow the fucking producers got it in their minds that people were walking out of the last two Jurassic Parks saying, "Yeah, it was pretty cool, but I wish the Tyrannosaurs were bigger. What were they, like 45 feet long? That's hardly scary. Now 60 feet, that would really frighten the shit out of me." Hence, the duck billed spinosaurus. Bigger, meaner, faster and lamer than T. Rex, the spinosaurus chased the boring people on the screen all over the island. And it looked like a duck. Don't you think at some point Spielberg would have said to director Johnston, "Listen Joe, about Jurassic Park 3. Remember that movie I did called Jaws? Yeah, right. The one with the big shark in it. No, the two before that one. Right, with Dreyfus. Well here's the thing. I didn't show the shark too much in that one, because I had really strong characters and an interesting plot to carry the movie. By the time those hacks at Universal made the fourth installment, Jaws: The Revenge, they had nothing but a great big shark that hunted people across the world and stood up on its tail. This isn't porno, bigger doesn't mean better." The poor spinosaur even came across as retarded because it couldn't kill anybody. In my movie, that thing kills everybody. Twice.

Raptors that not only talk, but that are really smart: One of my favorite parts from the first Jurassic Park was near the end when Laura Dern was being chased by some Raptors and just before they killed her, they started attacking each other. That was good, because it showed how important things like fact and evolution are to an otherwise goofy story line. The raptors had no motive. They were just mindless, violent reptiles that would just as gladly attack each other as a human. It made the unbelievable believable. In this shit-fest, the raptors can not only talk, but they are concerned about who stole their eggs... Dr. Grant's assistant, Billy (Alessandro Nivola), the one guy besides Grant on the Island who should know better, steals some raptor eggs. Not because he knew they were valuable and he wanted the money for himself, but because he is such a dedicated paleontologist that he realizes the sale of the eggs would give him money, "enough to fund the dig site for another ten more years." Because of this, the raptors chase all of them around the island. They want their eggs back. For about two seconds I thought about the fact that dinosaurs just laid eggs and then took off to go and eat more and that all sorts of animals would always be stealing or eating their eggs. The final second of the thought had something to do with raptors getting angry at and stalking other egg thieving dinosaurs. Then I went back to just yelling at the TV. Also, and don't even worry about how he has it, but he has it, Dr. Grant at one point "talks" to the raptors with a raptor "vocal module" and tells them not to kill his little crew. Actors have no souls.

Good bad characters: This is a fault common to most Hollywood summer blockbusters, but in no way forgotten about here. None of the fucking characters are bad. Not one. Bill Macy and Tea Leoni` trick Dr. Grant into going back to the one place where "No force on earth or Heaven" could get him back to. But they aren't bad people. They're just desperate, good middle class Americans who are concerned about the welfare of their child. OK, so they are endangering the lives of half a dozen other people, eventually killing three of them, but they meant well. Or that stupid fucking Billy character who endangered everybody by "stealing" the raptor eggs. After Dr. Grant tells him to go fuck himself for being a selfish, greedy bastard (but not for being the latest in a long line of pretty faced Hollywood midgets, oddly) he of course para-jumps off a cliff into the talons of four pterodactyls in order to save the kid. I was cheering so loud when Billy died three minutes later. Only he didn't die. At the end, for no apparent reason other than to make sure that no one in the theater was sad, they had Billy laying in a helicopter? With Dr. Grant's hat! Oh, that part was so fucking lame!!! What kind of a boring middle-aged asshole do you have to be to think this shit up?

And the fucking kid? Why was he para-gliding next to the Island where all the dinosaurs lived in the first place? I hate kids in movies. They always fuck up everything, although in this case, the movie was fucked to begin with. And why do all kids in movies have to be so fucking wholesome these days? When I was thirteen I thought about fucking girls and skateboarding. And pizza, sometimes. Trevor Morgan, the little dufuss who plays the kid in this one, is just retarded. When Dr. Grant and company crash land on the island, the three bad asses with the Barrett .50 machine guns get killed in thirty seconds. Yet, we are supposed to believe that this little puffy faced, bowl-cutted brat has survived for eight weeks all by himself? Fuck the team of studio monkeys/writers for being brain damaged enough to think of that shit. Morgan is so boring and white that I just want to shoot him up with heroin and a dirty needle. Anyhow, the kid eventually rescues Dr. Grant with smoke grenades. As I said, Jaws: The Revenge made as much sense. Burn your local copies of Jurassic Park III on the shelf of the store.

DVD Extras

As usual, there is an enormous amount of extra material included and most of it sucks. There is about five minutes worth where they show us Steven Spielberg filming the first two movies, even though he wisely had nothing to do with the third festering pile. Then you get to the production crew, who smugly explain that "new science" has shown us that tyrannosaurs weren't that bad and that spinosaurs were the real big cocks on the block. It seems like they feel that if they can just convince us of this fact, then we will forgive them for the horrible garbage movie they made. There is one woman, named Kathleen Kennedy, who is so fucking awful that you just want to burn her. She sits there and pats herself on the back for how fucking brilliant everyone involved with the movie is. She spits out lines like this, "We're pushing ourselves harder than anyone could push us." Which is a fucking lie, because I could push all of them very, very hard. Off a cliff. Oh, and there is a ton of Spielberg worship. Shit like, "When you are working with someone as brilliant as Steven [who had nothing to do with this wretched film other than to bequeath it to Johnston] you have to realize that you are in the presence of God. He is going to say and do things that normal people cannot understand and that even highly evolved geniuses like us here in Hollywood struggle with?"

Everything else, besides the cool Dinosaur Turntable, is just your usual, boring, typical studio crap.

Ruthless Ratings

• Film, Overall: 2
• DVD Extras: 4
• Story: 1
• Acting: 4
• Direction: 2

Ruthless Reviews Special Ratings

• Number of cigarettes smoked, if applicable: I'm still sick
• Number of beers drank: 1 And it was a peach flavored beer that Becky brought that only made me enjoy the movie less.
• Number of times movie was paused to do something else: We sat in rapt attention at how lousy this pile was. Plus, it was under and hour and a half long.
• Number of times you found yourself enjoying the movie: Sometimes the dinosaurs looked cool. But then, one of the stupid humans would take up the whole screen and I began to hate it again.
• Number of times you wished you had taken that screenwriting class: 40 times.
• Number of times the oppressive soundtrack made you reach for your knife: From the second the movie started. I began thinking about the Dogma 95 rules and the one which states that only music naturally occurring in the shot can be used in the film. Then I realized that Dogma 95 came about because of on screen atrocities like Jurassic Park III.
• Number of times you imagined the director snickering to himself: After watching the DVD Extras, the director really thought he was making a good movie. What an asshole.

Erich Sez...

The original Jurassic Park has such a clever and fun premise that you would really have to fuck up a sequel to make it all that bad.  Like one thing you could do, is to have all of the dinosaurs be in claymation and hire the guy who did Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run.  Then you use the same sound effects but it would be coming out of those funny mouths.  Remember how the chickens in Chicken Run talked?  Imagine that, but a dinosaur saying ?RAAAAAGHHHHHHRRRRR,? and the Sam Neil and all those people running in terror.

In this movie the Raptors are way smarter and act and sound differently than in the first two.  They could have made them like super smart and stuff.  Instead of the movie being about people running away from dinosaurs it could have been a serious drama, but with just raptors.  We could have followed the lives of a group of young raptors as they tried to fit in at Raptor High.  Will Terry the raptor ever be able to show his maw at school again after getting an erection in the showers after football practice?  Will Molly the raptor?s parents spot her quiet cries for help in time to save her from raptor anorexia?  And what will Mary, the awkward raptor do when she finally gets to go on her dream date with Tommy the hunky raptor only to discover that he is a racist?

But if it had been up to me, I would have used the same set up as the actual film--a divorced couple reunites to put together a team to find their kid who was lost on the island--but then one of the characters would have said "fuck it, the kid?s bound to be dead by now," and everybody would go on to have a normal movie, maybe about a ring of sexy car thieves who open a bar full of hot, singing, dancing women who have to form a team to blow up an asteroid the size of Texas before it hits earth, which would be deja vu for the raptors.

Ruthless Ratings

• Movie Overall: 4.5
• Direction: 5.5
• Acting: 6
• Story: 3