Twenty years after the first Jurassic Park ended in disaster, a new group of incompetents have tried their hand at making it work, a bit like when they kept re-branding Sunny Delight. And like Sunny Delight, the park’s owners try and avoid the uncomfortable fact their product has a tendency to kill their customers.

It stars Bryce Dallas Howard as the hapless park manager, and Ty Simpkins (the kid from Iron Man 3) and Nick Robinson (not that one) as her nephews who are visiting the park. It also features real life prat Chris Pratt, the only member of the cast to spend more time killing animals off screen than on it. He plays a zookeeper who has befriended the raptors he looks after, although the raptors were reluctant to be associated with such a brutal killer.

To combat declining attendance, the fools genetically engineer a super strong and super intelligent super dinosaur, in the biggest failure to learn the lessons of the past since the Spice Girls got back together. It might sound crazy, but genetically engineering a giga-dinosaur was actually the lesser of two evils. The other option was Christ Pratt’s suggestion of opening the park up as a Jurassic game reserve. The mega-dino inevitably breaks out, along with some of its scaly colleagues, meaning the humans have to try and stop the animals before they overrun the whole island. Or as Chris Pratt calls it, a good afternoon’s killin’.

Rapture of the raptors

I must admit the mega dinosaur is actually a bit of a let down. They do a long reveal, only showing bits of it, until eventually we see the whole thing and it’s basically a T-Rex with slightly bigger arms. This film works because it captures the spirit of the original, managing to be tense and exciting in equal measure, not because some computer guys cooked up a slightly toothier dinosaur. The T-Rex is basically a perfect killing machine, so there’s really not much left to do with it.

Also, the suggestion that a park with dinosaurs in would constantly need new attractions to keep the customers coming in is slightly implausible. I mean, Alton Towers is usually packed and they have rides which break people’s legs. Butlins manage to fill up their camps, and the only dinosaurs there are their underlying assumptions about what constitutes entertainment. The Dinosaur Adventure Park in Norfolk even keeps going, and their dinosaurs are made of plastic, although maybe if Jurassic World had the amazing slogan ‘It’s time you came-n-saurus’ they’d be doing better.

I guess the film is subject to the same desire for ever-increasing spectacle it seeks to portray, and just as this leads the characters in the film to take absurd risks, it leads the film makers to take absurd leaps of logic. It doesn’t really matter though, because as soon as the dinosaurs break out you’ll forget all that and enjoy the action. There’s plenty to get your teeth into.