NPR

Dino Vs. The Volcano: 'Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom' Generates Intermittent Heat

In this derivative but fitfully inventive fifth installment of the Jurassic franchise, our heroes try to rescue Isla Nublar's dinosaurs from extinction-by-lava, only to get their ash handed to them.
Sleep Dino More: Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Owen (Chris Pratt) try not to wake one of Isla Nublar's grumpiest residents in <em>Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom</em>.

Children are plagued by the occasional certainty that there's a monster in their basement, if not right under their bed, and they're almost always wrong. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the follow-up to 2015's mediocre but hugely successful revival of the Jurassic franchise, is the exception that proves the rule.

This fifth installment is so desperate to recombine the strands of the 25-year-old series in a novel way that halfway through its ruuuuuuuun! time, it takes a bizarre but not unwelcome left turn, evolving from yet another sweaty Central American dino-safari into a Gothic haunted house flick.

Monsters in the basement. Monsters in the bedroom. Monsters on the auction block, raked in the fifth-highest box-office take in film history, grossing a paltry $1.7 billion, so you can see why the filmmakers felt compelled to tweak the formula into something a little closer to

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