Worlds away from the original

Jurassic World may satisfy audiences, but for me, the thrill is gone.

Jurassic World, the latest successor to the 1993 megahit Jurassic Park, includes chatter about gene-splicing and a few other concessions to the moment, but the movie still manages to feel dated and even a bit stale: a mixture of standard shocks, rote plot developments, dinosaurs gone wild and cornball moments that play like bad Steven Spielberg.

There's a possible reason for that: Spielberg, who directed the original, served as an executive producer of this edition and selected its director and co-writer Colin Trevorrow.

Mostly unknown to mass audiences, Trevorrow made a much-admired indie, time-travel movie called Safety Not Guaranteed (2012). I wish I could say that Trevorrow hit this one out of the park (Jurassic, that is), but the best I can muster is subdued acknowledgement that he's assembled a movie that many will find satisfactory.

Alas, I am not a member of that group.

For me, Jurassic World lacks the bite and the fright of the original. It is neither ironic, nor completely sincere and its attempts at tongue in cheek humor feel more or less blatant.

At one point, for example, Trevorrow and his colleagues show a giant sea monster devouring a live white shark that's been suspended from a hook. Some may see this as a commentary on past blockbusters, but the filmmakers seem little concerned that the primary purpose of this brutal spectacle is to allow the audience to delight in a feeding frenzy.

This and lots of other action takes place at a theme park off the coast of Costa Rica. Tourists evidently flock to Jurassic World to enjoy views of dinosaurs in their natural habitat. The disasters of the first movie mostly have faded from memory, and Jurassic World has become a prime family destination.

True to show-business fashion, the owner of Jurassic World (Irrfan Khan) has pushed his staff to come up with a new and more frightening dinosaur. Heaven forbid that the ravenous multitudes become bored with the same old predators.

The wizards at Jurassic World have responded by genetically engineering a creature called Indominus rex, a massive white beast that's being kept under wraps. Think it eventually will get loose?

A whiff of a story blows through the increasingly rampant action. Two brothers (Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins) are sent by their parents to visit their aunt Claire (Dallas Bryce Howard). As the super-busy manager of Jurassic World, Claire initially delegates responsibility for her nephews to a less-than-enthusiastic assistant.

Of course, things go awry. Indominus breaks loose, people are gobbled up or trampled, and Trevorrow piles on action that's supposed to quicken the pulse.

The actors often are stuck gaping at the special effects, cueing the audience that it's time to respond with a sense of wonder.

A word or two about the movie's wafer-thin characters.

Chris Pratt plays Jurassic World's raptor trainer and animal advocate. He also provides an obligatory love interest for Claire. Both Pratt and Howard are given an old-fashioned gloss that revolves around faux bickering and lame banter.

For her part, Howard's character spends most of the movie running from danger in high heels. A bow to the unabashed movie glamor of yesteryear?

In another failure of imagination, the movie introduces us to Jurassic World's head of security (Vincent D'Onofrio). This guy harbors conspiratorial ideas about using dangerous dinos for military purposes. Once again the government wants to co-opt science to bolster its own malignant ambitions.

In its most daring twist, the movie treats its raptors as tolerant of those who are friendly to them. At times, these raptors stop just short of being cuddly, thus reflecting the dual Spielbergian sense of danger and intimacy.

Here's one way to evaluate the movie: Close your eyes for 10 minutes. Then open them. Jurassic World will look pretty much like it did when you stopped watching. People will be running. Some will be eaten. Others will scream. It's chaos, I tell you. Chaos.

Not much thought seems to have been given to exacting sympathy for those poor souls who become dinosaur food, and the only thing about Jurassic World that made me scream were some obvious, early picture product placements. Too bad the dinosaurs didn't gobble some of them up, as well.

Well-acted 'Help' could have hit harder

Viola Davis gives an outstanding performance, but the big-screen adaptation of a wildly popular novel lacks bite.

The Help. the big-screen adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's best-selling 2009 novel, attempts to explore the complex relationships between black maids and the white women who employed them at a time when the civil rights struggle was just beginning to change the South.

Set in Jackson, Miss., The Help boasts some impressive acting, as well as some understanding of the indigestible mixture of gentility, brutality, tension and moral rot that defined the Jim Crow era.

Deluded whites may have thought of their maids as part of the family, but they objected if the maids wanted to use the same bathrooms as the rest of the "family," and they certainly weren't above patronizing and exploiting women who labored for as little as $182 per month.

Despite all this, The Help shows that black maids often loved their white charges. Struggling to make ends meet, black women raised white kids with wisdom and affection -- even while being subjected to unconscionable doses of daily humiliation.

On screen, The Help displays great sympathy for the maids on which the story focuses, but the movie's also saddled with a tired ploy, building its story around a recent white college graduate (Emma Stone) who aspires to be a writer. Hoping to provide a platform for voices that hitherto had not been heard in the white community, Stone's Skeeter decides to tell the stories of Jackson's black maids.

Skeeter approaches Aibileen (Viola Davis) about helping to tell these stories from a black point of view. Aibileen, we learn, raised 17 white kids, and when we meet her she's tending to the daughter of an incompetent and indifferent white mother.

A word about Davis, who was nominated for a best-supporting actress Oscar for her work opposite Meryl Streep in Doubt. Davis seems incapable of hitting a wrong note. She carries the weight of Aibileen's past with bitterness, rue and grace. You get the sense that Davis knows the truth of every scene in which she finds herself, and isn't afraid to speak it.

The outspoken Minny (Octavia Spencer) emerges as the movie's other principal maid, a sout powerhouse of a woman who winds up working for Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain), a befuddled bleach-blonde who's inept at being a wife and whose lower-class origins revolt Jackson's bridge-playing set.

Spencer can be a funny and quick, but I had a slight qualm about the way she turned Minny's indignation into entertainment.

Sporting a mass of tangled curls, Stone creates an intelligent small portrait of rebellion as Skeeter deals with her mother (Allison Janney), a cancer-stricken woman who wants nothing more than to see her daughter marry.

Bryce Dallas Howard plays Hilly Holbrook, the movie's resident ogre, a white woman of bitchy, racist sensibilities. The Help has been criticized for turning Howard's character into a caricature. I get that, but it's worth remembering that subtlety wasn't a hallmark of Southern racism in 1963.

As non-threatening as a racial drama can be, The Help unfolds episodically with occasional references to brewing turmoil in the South, notably the murder of Medgar Evers. Evers' murder galvanizes the maids, encouraging them to tell their stories to Skeeter, who needs at least a dozen such tales to get her book published.

Carefully appointed and prone to nostalgia, The Help hits its share of wrong notes: A joke about "the terrible awful" -- perhaps the movie's biggest crowd-pleaser -- is as overworked as the movie's maids; and first time director Tate Taylor, an actor and friend of the novel's author, can't resist drawing out the movie's ending lest he leave risk leaving us even a little uninspired.

Worse than any of that, The Help -- which is a bit of a curio -- may encourage misguided feelings that racism somehow has been safely locked in the closet of the past where it no longer can do any harm. For all its virtues, The Help doesn't go far enough, hit hard enough or dig deep enough. It could have benefited from less burnish and more bite.