This film fails — jaw-droppingly — on every level.
The premise is ridiculous, poorly rationalized, and fails to maintain internal consistency. The main characters are inadequately conceived, one-dimensional stick figures that lack even enough depth to be considered clichés. The so-called “acting” ranges from risibly burlesque to line readings so wooden they warp.
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| All hell breaks loose, once the folks on Oak Street realize that — somehow, improbably — their entire neighborhood has been dumped back in time, to the Jurassic Period. |
I don’t understand. Back in 2014, Mitchell lit up Hollywood with It Follows, a smart, scary and genuinely original little shocker that frightened the Jujubes out of viewers.
What happened to that guy?
He sure isn’t anywhere to be seen here...
The year is 1982. Events begin during a lively block party in a middle-class suburban neighborhood. Greg and Denise Platt (McGregor and Hathaway) and their children — teenage Audrey (Maisy Stella) and adolescent Brian (Christian Convery) — are introduced gaily participating in a sack race. Family dog Starbuck watches from one side.
Ah, but — behind the scenes — all is not well in the Platt household. Greg uncharacteristically works odd jobs and drinks too much; Denise is writing a novel that reflects her own unhappy marriage; Audrey and Brian worry their parents will divorce.
Starbuck tends to poop in the back yard of next-door neighbor Mel Jacobs (P.J. Byrne), a Mr. Crankypants who threatens to shoot the dog if it happens again. (One suspects he won’t last long, when things go south.)
Brian pals around with three friends. He always carries a toy bow and arrow. (This would have made sense in the mid-1950s, when boys his age were part of the pop culture Davy Crocket/coonskin cap craze, but in 1982? It’s ... weird.)
The next couple of days are mostly uneventful. Brian and his pals spot a new girl in town (Jordan Alexa Davis, as Jeannette). They speculate whether she attends a private school. One of Denise’s neighbors shares a strange plant that sprouted overnight in her back yard. While Denise tries to determine what it is, the local librarian examines her photograph and immediately identifies it ... as something that has been extinct for millions of years.
(That’s an impressive bit of trivia, to have at the tip of her tongue.)
Late that evening, the night sky explodes with a thundering roar and blinding flash of light, and the power goes out. Assuming a blown transformer, they bunk together in the living room. The following morning, the power still is off; so is the plumbing. The basement is flooded, and the ambient temperature is warmer than usual.
Things feel ... different. Strange noises. A change in pressure. Starbuck is gone. Telling the kids to remain indoors, Greg and Denise explore the neighborhood. Each soon comes to the attention of raptor-esque dinosaurs, and they barely make it home alive.
As the family soon discovers, a circular, several-mile chunk of their neighborhood has suddenly been transported back to the Jurassic Period. Audrey theorizes that this resulted from cosmic “wormhole activity.” (We assume she comes by this assumption because we’ve seen her reading a book about man’s landing on the Moon. Uh-huh.)
All of them huddle in the living room. Denise, Audrey and Brian are terrified; Greg is oddly upbeat (?!?). Denise calls him on this irrational optimism.
“God’s not gonna let us die here,” McGregor intones, in what has all the gravitas of a cold reading spoken to an empty room: a line that elicited a well-deserved howl of laughter from Monday evening’s preview screening crowd. (The crowd kept laughing, as events proceeded. Not with the movie, but at it.)
From this point forward, the focus is solely on the Platt family. They never try to contact any neighbors, to share supplies, seek out weapons, strategize, whatever. We never see Brian’s friends again. (As a measure of their anonymity, they’re listed in the cast as Buddy #1, Buddy #2 and so forth.)
Indeed, the only neighbors glimpsed, moving forward — with two notable exceptions — are the frequent bodies being devoured by dinosaurs of various sizes.
The following evening, all four of them now well and truly convinced that they’re surrounded by dangerous, ravenous monsters, Brian spots Starbuck running through their back yard. So the boy naturally climbs out his bedroom window, and tries to follow the dog. Armed with his toy boy and arrow (!).
Audrey spots him leaving. Does she yell for her parents? Of course not. She also leaves the house, following her brother. Armed with a pocket knife (!!).
When Greg and Denise realize their children are gone, they tear off after them. Armed with their car (!!!).
Long before this point, it has become clear that this is the pluperfect “idiot plot,” which lurches from one scene to the next, because each and every character acts like an idiot at all times. It also defies the laws of motion, because our puny human beings continuously manage to escape dinosaurs that clearly run much faster.
Audrey does eventually to catch up with her brother, at which point they (rather ridiculously) save Jeannette from one of the raptors. So what’s the first thing Brian’s says, to the terrified girl?
“What it’s like, going to private school?”
(Picture me shaking my head, in disbelief.)
The following morning, having failed to find the kids, Greg and Denise hear a strange sound. They peer around a corner, and see two huge dinosaurs boinking against the side of a house. So, naturally, Denise insists that Greg pose for a selfie with the Polaroid camera she just happens to be carrying.
Seriously? Clumsy comic relief, after so many bodies have been eviscerated? Has Mitchell no sense of tone?
He ultimately builds to a completely ridiculous deus ex machina finale, and lards that further with a time travel paradox laden with glaring inconsistencies.
This flick doesn’t even succeed as brain-dead popcorn trash.
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