Universal Pictures's Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has drummed up $450 million overseas, but it's failed to grab similar support from critics.
"Fallen Kingdom is so committed to thunderous spectacle that it fails to capture the poetry of these beasts in all their spiky, scaly, long-necked wonder," Stephanie Zacharek, a reporter for Time, wrote Thursday. "They deserve better."
Fallen Kingdom comes three years after its predecessor, Jurassic World, made an arrival in 2015. The sequel follows Chris Pratt's Owen Grady as he aims to save the remaining dinosaurs on Isla Nublar from a once dormant volcano that's readying itself for an eruption. The original film not only generated $1.6 million worldwide, but it earned a 71 percent score Rotten Tomatoes and 59 percent from Metacritic.
The franchise's second installment currently sits at 52 percent on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.
"Chris Pratt returns as the leading man of this series, and everything he says tends to sound like a double entendre," The Wrap's Dan Callahan wrote June 5. "Pratt is a charismatic, good-looking, funny guy, and he might be a real star if he could only get one or two good roles and sever himself from lucrative formula junk like this."
Callahan further suggested that the film's "suspense scenes get particularly lazy toward the end" and referred to it as a "very dull entry."
The AV Club's Jesse Hassenger deemed Fallen Kingdom "the mish-mashiest entry yet," but he didn't entirely drag the film either. He said he admired its strength in "forging of its own weird path."
"The thematic work of Fallen Kingdom is scribbly and half-finished, a series of dopey riffs on what came before about humans living with the consequences of their scientific meddling," Hassenger wrote June 5. "But as a lava-spewing, raptor-training, teeth-gnashing, monster-in-the-basement creature feature, it has a certain freshness."
Fallen Kingdom is directed by J. A. Bayona, with a screenplay penned by Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly. Its slated to earn between $135 million and $150 million in its domestic box office debut weekend, according to early predictions. After Thursday night previews, the sequel earned $15.3 million from audiences in North America.
Universal Pictures is expected to develop a third installment to the Jurassic World franchise. The upcoming film is scheduled for a June 2021 release.
