Jurassic Dreams

How many youngsters will see Chris Pratt in Jurassic World and deposit his image in their spank bank? One of pop culture's dividends is the additional pleasures contained within innocuous merchandizing (ask Andy Warhol). Jurassic World is neither good or bad enough to be camp -- its predictable action scenes are limp enough to call "damp" -- but Pratt's He-Man image as dinosaur roustabout Owen is the kind that firms-up any man's resolve.

Pratt's Owen wears a leather utility vest over a denim shirt cuffed at his elbow to expose his sinewy forearms. His torso is cinched into dark pants that puff slightly at the hips, roomy enough to contain his strong haunches. And at the appropriate moment, Owen/Pratt strides forth carrying a rifle for his fight against a gargantuan dino-hybrid, the Indomitable Rex. It completes the virile image. This kind of movie eroticism isn't new; it harkens back to pre-Stonewall movies of the 1950s and '60s from the Hercules series, physique magazines to Charlton Heston in Ruby Gentry, The Naked Jungle, The Big Country, The Wreck of Mary Deare, Ben-Hur, The War Lord, Planet of the Apes, Number One (stop me). It goes back even further depending on how Hollywood presented the masculine form as a cultural ideal.

But it's not all innocently raging hormones. Jurassic World, the third sequel of the 1990s dinosaur adventure series, is the product of one of the canniest filmmakers in Hollywood history. Producer Steven Spielberg always knows what he's doing whether you like it or not -- remember dreamboat Brad Johnson in Always? ("He looks like I won him in a raffle," Holly Hunter gushed.) Spielberg's decision to cast Pratt, streamlined from his bearish role on TV's Parks & Recreations series to his buff military image first showcased in Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, carries cultural significance.

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This Owen is not just a hybrid of the series' Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum daddy figures, both braniacs; Owen's a deliberately sexualized Spielberg brainiac like the two-fisted anthropologist Indiana Jones. (Owen empathizes with the raptors he trains without fear: "I said I was Navy, not Navajo" he explains.) Why repeat that archetype--especially in a series that plays with evolution, ontology, phylogeny and race? Contrasting Owen with his brawny African assistant Barry (Omar Sy) and Indian park owner Marsani (Irffan Kahn) perpetuates Hollywood's unquestioned white male supremacist fantasies.

Pratt himself is not to blame; his dark blond, sharp-nosed, blue-eyed type deserves its appeal but dramatic scenes opposite military contractor Vincent D'Onofrio exposes definite weaknesses. Pratt has muscle but the burly D'Onofrio has acting strength. Something's unconvincing, half-parodistic, in Pratt's bearing (he's like a gainfully employed Matthew Rush but less stolid than Chris Hemsworth's similarly imposing Thor). It's easy to imagine Pratt providing one-note effectiveness in a Josef Von Sternberg silent erotic masterpiece, playing stevedore roles like George O'Brien in The Docks of New York or in Murnau's Sunrise where a big man's physical heft was erotically magnetizing and then drew one into his spiritual being.

The Jurassic World script doesn't allow Pratt the personal charm -- the wink -- that Harrison Ford brought off as Indy, hero of many adolescent boys' dreams. Pratt's eyes are gentle, yet his stout-thewed crouch and voluptuous trapazoids overwhelm this formulaic movie -- and Bryce Dallas Howard's shrill, vapid Park supervisor. She's unappealing as Owen's love interest. Maybe a lesbian critic could try justifying her cold acting but who can say what hetero guys who see Jurassic World put into their spank banks? I bet it's Owen.

Jurassic World opens nationwide Friday, June 12