June 13, 2015 -- This fourth installment of the Jurassic Park film series shows some wear and tear, but there is still some gas left in the tank. A significant portion of the film is used to set up the next film in the series. They will keep making more of these until we stop watching.

The first Jurassic Park film was notable for its pioneering work in computer animation, the real magic behind bringing dinosaurs back to life. That is old hat now. Computer animation is so widely used in films now it is routine. So what do you do to attract audiences? You make bigger, meaner dinosaurs, that's what. In a future theme park, where everything is more advanced, except for the motorcycles and helicopters, the public has gotten tired of seeing real dinosaurs, so the scientists at the lab are told to make bigger, badder ones to attract more people. Sounds kinda familiar, doesn't it?

Enter Chris Pratt, off his big success in “Guardians of the Galaxy,” to play the same kind of character in this movie, Owen, a rugged, wise-cracking animal trainer/hero. Owen is a park employee working with over-sized Velociraptors, training them to act like hunting dogs used in fox hunts. He is called in by the park's billionaire owner, Simon Masrani (played by Irrfan Khan of “Slumdog Millionaire”) to examine the cage used to house his next big attraction, a kind of super-sized T-Rex with more brain power, camouflage and other dangerous capabilities.

Owen, and others keep warning those in charge that it is a bad idea to make entirely new species of animals, with such dangerous combinations of traits like these. Somebody's going to get killed. Of course people die -- horrible deaths, too, but the one of the few times someone sheds a tear in the movie is not for the people who die, but for the death of a plant-eating dinosaur. Weird, huh?

Two children visiting the park get caught up in this Apatosaurus-sized mess, brothers Zach and Gray Mitchell (Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins) are sent to the theme park alone by their parents, where the boys are to be accompanied by their aunt Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard of “The Help”) who is one of the park's top administrators. Claire is too busy to watch the boys so she turns them over to an assistant. The boys quickly ditch the assistant and are off on their own, playing with dinosaurs. What could possibly go wrong?

Dinosaurs escape, the boys, and lots of other people, make some very bad choices and pretty soon people are running and screaming, and, you know, chomp chomp. These Jurassic Park developers never learn anything. They keep making the same stupid mistakes.

There is romantic tension between Owen and Claire, who once had a fling. There is also some tension between a couple of the nicer park employees, nerdy tech-guy Lowery (Jake Johnson of “Let's Be Cops”) and fellow control room employee Vivian (Lauren Lapkus of “Blended”). An excellent actor, Vincent D'Onofrio (“The Judge”) who plays Hoskins, lurks around menacingly throughout much of the movie, advancing a shady corporate military agenda. This guy's put on some serious weight since he did that hilarious turn as an alien in “Men in Black” in 1997.

The special effects are good, and so is the acting, but this old plot is getting worn out. You can't keep running a tourist attraction where tourists are eaten by the livestock. When the sharks are on the loose all the time in the water, people stop swimming. The legal fees alone would kill the enterprise. The mistakes that these people make are so obvious and so stupid that it strains credulity. This is passable escapist fare, even though the plot gets bogged down during the many non-action scenes, some of which serve only to set up the next movie. Some new ideas are needed in this series. This film rates a C+.

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