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Age of Dinosaurs (2013) 


Starring Treat Williams, Ronny Cox, Jillian Rose Reed, Andray Johnson, Max Ari

Directed by Joseph J. Lawson

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The most important thing I learned from watching Age of Dinosaurs is that a heavily-armed SWAT team and missile-launching military helicopters may prove to be no match for rampaging dinosaurs, but give Treat Williams a 2x4 and watch prehistoric ass get kicked.

Any of you remember those old "Dinosaurs Attack" trading cards? Age of Dinosaurs is like a less gory Asylum mockbuster movie version of those cards. A series of silly dinosaur chase and attack scenes tied together by the thinnest of storylines - nothing more, nothing less. I'm talking a storyline so thin that when the end credits began to roll, there really wasn't much of a sense of resolution; it looked like two characters had reached a safe vantage point while I was left wondering if they were having their happy moment as Los Angeles continued to be overrun by man-eating dinosaurs or if I was supposed to accept that all the other dinosaurs had been successfully killed during a special effects sequence the filmmakers clearly didn't have the budget to satisfactorily complete in order to make the outcome more clear.

But going back to the "Dinosaurs Attack" comparison, once you get past the initial set-up and the reptiles begin running amok, you could edit most any other scene to follow in any random order and it really wouldn't make all that much difference. Again, the sensation is that the scenes are just individual trading cards come to life. Dinosaurs eat people in an auditorium. Dinosaurs chase people around an office. Dinosaurs fight a SWAT team. Dinosaurs chase a car down city streets. Dinosaurs fight a Blackhawk helicopter. Dinosaurs chase people through a shopping mall. Dinosaurs stop to fight each other. Dinosaurs chase people through a bar. Dinosaurs escape from their laboratory confines. Dinosaurs chase people through a garment shop. Dinosaurs gets shot, axed, tasered, beaten with a hockey stick and a 2x4. Ronny Cox goes up the stairs. Ronny Cox goes down the stairs. A final battle with a pteradon takes place atop the Hollywood sign. That's pretty much it. Dinosaurs are on the attack.

The only things tying it all together are hard luck fireman Treat Williams and his teenage daughter, Jade (Jillian Rose Reed, "Awkward", "Weeds"), being the primary focus of the dinosaurs' attention and Ronny Cox as the paraplegic CEO of the genetics firm that brought the dinosaurs to life finally able to walk again after using some genetic engineering on himself, only to spend the rest of the movie running around moping over how he never wanted any of this to happen.