'65'.....EVERYTHING BUT THE WOLVES YAPPIN' AT THEIR HEELS.....

65 (2023),  a stripped down, no frills sci-fi action-adventure parked itself theaters briefly before settling in to its ultimate nesting place, Netflix. 

            The guys who wrote "A Quiet Place" came up with what they thought was another high-concept, lean 'n mean little rollercoaster theme-park ride.......A space pilot (Adam Drive) and little girl (Ariana Greenblatt) stranded on a prehistoric planet populated with a host of CGI dinosaurs......who look like they blew their tryouts to get into "Jurassic World". 

            But wait!  There's more!  Driver and tyke are actually galactic residents from long ago, in a galaxy, far far away.  The planet they've crashed on (courtesy of an asteroid storm) is none other than our own green ball Earth some 65 million years ago.......

              Sucks for them, for sure, since they spend the film's 90 minutes dodging a variety of voracious dinos in all shapes and sizes......and designed by digital artists for maximum creepiness without ever referencing any real paleontology info........

              There is one scientific theory this film buys into though.......that the dinos met their doom at the hands of a  jumbo asteroid colliding with earth......and guess when that's gonna happen. 

              ......just as Driver and doll-baby desperately hike up to their damaged ship's escape vehicle, still parked on a mountain top,  Sheesh.....talk about bad timing......

              With all the perpetual perils crammed into the film's brief running time, it's never boring, to say the least. But then again, it's never adds up to any more that what it purports to be......a catalog of calamities hurled, one after the other, at an adult and child....the same formula that worked for these screenwriters in "A Quiet Place"

                For an actor as intense and talented as Driver, this seems like a waste of time, (how did Nicholas Cage let this role slip by him?) but on the plus side,  young Greenblatt's more than his equal in conveying the fear and panic required. 

               Not much else to say......fanboys and fangirls might think of it as a semi-acceptable time-waster for and an hour and a half......I'm not why anyone else would bother with it. 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)