Starring Chris Pratt, Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern, Sam Neill, Bryce Dallas Howard

Directed by Colin Trevorrow

Universal, out now

Dinosaurs are now endemic across the globe, but a biotech company with dubious ambitions is abusing the technology, threatening the survival of civilisation.

While I avoid reading reviews before seeing something for myself, I’d have to have been living in a cave not to know that the latest, and (hopefully) final Jurassic World movie has received something of a roasting in the critical press.

Perhaps it’s precisely because I entered the cinema with my expectations at rock bottom that I’m pleased to report I had a perfectly enjoyable time as the trilogy rounded off by getting most of the old band back together again, seeing not just Goldblum, but Laura Dern and Sam Neill reprising their roles from the original Jurassic Park movie.

Dominion is a game of two halves and definitely forty minutes too long. The first hour and a quarter is largely successful. It feels reasonably fresh given that so many dino-tropes are pretty well-trodden nearly thirty years on from the original film. We are re-introduced to the (excess of) characters in a world where pre-historic creatures are now roaming the countryside and nesting on the tops of Manhattan skyscrapers. There are some genuinely thrilling set pieces, notably in a sequence set on Malta with dinosaurs chasing through the narrow streets and all sorts going on in a convincingly-realised illegal dino-trading market. It’s a world I found myself believing in and wanting to explore.

When the action transfers to Biosyn’s implausible dinosaur reserve (basically Jurassic Park without tourists, but with a completely nonsensical microclimate) the movie runs into something of a quagmire. Here, we are on much more familiar territory, which exposes the weariness of the franchise. We’ve seen most of this before, and because the story has gathered characters like a mucky snowball, we now have three or four plot strands and at least eight central characters, arguably more than ten. It descends into a soup of exposition, cod philosophising and incomprehensible plot objectives. As Dominion lumbers into its final act, the whole thing loses focus and starts to stall, plunging into a splodgy narrative mess.

It was noticeable that the kids in the cinema were perfectly engaged for the first ninety minutes, but grew increasingly bored, and started chatting and playing hide and seek as the movie drew to a close.

To Dominion’s credit, it does try to introduce some new, more feathery monsters, but unfortunately one of them looks a bit like a lizardy Cookie Monster, and the other seems surprisingly, enjoyably camp, albeit with lethally effective fingernails.

Verdict: For all its flaws I think it would be mealy mouthed to be too po-faced about Dominion. Yes, like so many films in recent years, including plenty that have been better received, it outstays its welcome, but it’s mostly decent fun, and I was happy to while away a couple of hours watching it. I was even quite excited in places. 6/10

Martin Jameson