Here is a cut-rate family caper aimed at younger kids, very much not to be confused with the Jurassic Park dino-thriller franchise. It’s actually a sequel to a film from 2019 that doesn’t appear to have been released in the UK; the awful acting on show here might explain why. It takes a few scenes to acclimatise to actors delivering lines with tight tranquillised smiles, like kidnap victims being forced to put on a show, gun held to their backs. Though to be fair, the sub-standard animated dinosaurs aren’t much cop either.
Sophie Proctor plays teenager Wendy, an only child who resents her parents taking in a younger kid called Curtis (Myles Currin-Moore) from the orphanage for the Christmas holidays. Wendy is furious when Curtis tags along on a visit to her kooky gran’s house in the woods. But pretty soon she lets him in on a secret: every full moon a portal door opens, and out wanders a herd of friendly dinosaurs.
On one of these sorties, calamity strikes when a baby T-Rex called Junior is separated from his parents and doesn’t make it back through the portal in time. Meanwhile, a local criminal invents a sleeping gas for a nefarious plan to be pulled off by his two miserably unfunny sidekicks.
Perhaps inspired by recent paleontological research that T-Rex’s brains were in fact larger than the proverbial ping-pong ball, Wendy’s gran soon teaches little Junior how to speak, though the unthought-through script doesn’t quite know what to do with this development. Kids’ films about talking dinosaurs returning to Earth through portal doors don’t need to be convincing, but they really shouldn’t be this dull and unimaginative. You’ll be praying for extinction – possibly your own.
• The Adventures of Jurassic Pet 2: The Lost Secret is released on 8 May on digital platforms.
