Monster classic returns: Savour the chance to see Jurassic Park on the big screen

By Chris Tookey

PUBLISHED: 16:52 EST, 22 August 2013 | UPDATED: 17:50 EST, 22 August 2013

Jurassic Park 3D (PG)

Verdict: All-time-great-monster-movie

Rating:

Forget the 3D. This imax re-release of 1993’s biggest hit is mostly a very welcome memo to Hollywood that blockbusters don’t have to be stupid.

Truly outstanding monster movies turn their monsters into more than special effects. And, Steven Spielberg does just that. 

Through a series of telling images, Spielberg makes it clear — as Sam Neill and the children in his care are nearly killed by a falling car, an electrified perimeter fence and a failed computer system — that the real monster is the modern technology which created the dinosaurs but is now out of control.

Audiences should run- not walk- to see Jurassic Park on the big screen

Where Jurassic Park was superior to Spielberg’s previous action films, was that here he shows how adventure can change people.

Sam Neill discovers paternal feelings he never suspected, and the well-intentioned villain of the piece, played by Richard Attenborough, discovers the perils of even benevolent totalitarianism.

If you haven’t seen this on a big screen, treat yourself. It’s awe-inspiring, and John Williams’s sweeping, melodic score is a triumph.

The awe-inspiring epic shows filmmakers that blockbusters can be both heartfelt and clever

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Monster classic returns: Savour the chance to see Jurassic Park on the big screen

By Chris Tookey

PUBLISHED: 16:52 EST, 22 August 2013 | UPDATED: 17:50 EST, 22 August 2013

Jurassic Park 3D (PG)

Verdict: All-time-great-monster-movie

Rating:

Forget the 3D. This imax re-release of 1993’s biggest hit is mostly a very welcome memo to Hollywood that blockbusters don’t have to be stupid.

Truly outstanding monster movies turn their monsters into more than special effects. And, Steven Spielberg does just that. 

Through a series of telling images, Spielberg makes it clear — as Sam Neill and the children in his care are nearly killed by a falling car, an electrified perimeter fence and a failed computer system — that the real monster is the modern technology which created the dinosaurs but is now out of control.

Audiences should run- not walk- to see Jurassic Park on the big screen

Where Jurassic Park was superior to Spielberg’s previous action films, was that here he shows how adventure can change people.

Sam Neill discovers paternal feelings he never suspected, and the well-intentioned villain of the piece, played by Richard Attenborough, discovers the perils of even benevolent totalitarianism.

If you haven’t seen this on a big screen, treat yourself. It’s awe-inspiring, and John Williams’s sweeping, melodic score is a triumph.

The awe-inspiring epic shows filmmakers that blockbusters can be both heartfelt and clever

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2 Guns review: Big guns fire blanks: Not even stars Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington can save this dumbed-down remake of a Walter Matthau comedy classic

By Chris Tookey

PUBLISHED: 21:13 GMT, 15 August 2013 | UPDATED: 21:40 GMT, 15 August 2013

2 Guns (15)

Verdict: 2 violent, 2 unoriginal

Rating:

Going to the movies this summer has been like turning up at a series of much-loved restaurants and discovering that they have been taken over by junk-food chains.

If you want to watch stories with coherent plotting, intelligent dialogue and something to say, you’d be better off renting box sets of high-class TV shows, such as Borgen, Breaking Bad and Justified.

Roll on the autumn, when studios may begin to show us a few films that weren’t thought up by accountants.

Too bad: Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg waste their talents in this second-rate remake

With a ridiculous premise and incoherent dialogue, viewers looking for an intelligent thriller should stay at home

2 Guns is a knock-off of a good little comedy thriller from 1973 called Charlie Varrick, in which small-time criminal Walter Matthau robs a tiny bank and discovers he has stolen ten times the money he expected to. It belongs to the Mafia, who he proceeds to outwit.

In the dumbed-down, bigger-budget 2013 equivalent, the bank-robbers are Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg, who — unknown to each other — are both working undercover for government departments. 

The money they’ve stolen belongs to the CIA (portrayed as a uniquely sinister institution, accountable to no one), and our heroes find that the whole panoply of the American state is out to kill them.

You’d think this might be a shocking, even paranoid scenario, but instead it comes across as too ridiculous to be even slightly believable.

A facetious script and stock direction by Icelander Baltasar Kormakur (Contraband) reduce this to the level of all those second-rate gorefests made in the years after Pulp Fiction by minor talents who lacked Tarantino’s wit and invention but thought people being killed and blown up was ‘kinda cool’.

Washington and Wahlberg are both fine actors in the right film — but this isn’t it.

It’s Mr And Mrs Smith without the sexual conflict; a Lethal Weapon without the lively backchat. 

And it paints by numbers where just a hint of artistic integrity could have worked wonders.

The movie ends with a lot of money being set on fire for no particular reason. 

It’s an image that sums up this  summer’s artistically challenged, commercially suicidal array of Hollywood movies as a whole.

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