You can see the way the cogs in people’s thinking worked when it came to dreaming Theodore Rex up – it is a working attestation of the old chestnut about every film in Hollywood being sold in terms of comparisons with previous successes. Theodore Rex has clearly been pitched as Jurassic Park (1993) meets Lethal Weapon (1987). After the success of the Lethal Weapon films, the fantastic genre coughed up all manner of bizarre non-human buddy cop team-ups:– cop and vampire in tv’s Forever Knight (1992-6), cop and alien in Alien Nation (1988), cop and zombie in Dead Heat (1988), even cop and gnome in Upworld/A Gnome Named Gnorm (1992), but Theodore Rex (the pairing of cop and dinosaur) was possibly the most bizarre of them all. (It also intriguingly shows the paradigmatic shift produced by Jurassic Park – prior to that, the concept of animals revived from DNA fragments was a wildly revolutionary idea that would never have gotten out of the pages of a scientific journal, but now it becomes a de rigeur explanation thrown in to justify the proceedings. It also comes with a complete lack of plausibility – the film leaps from genetically reengineered dinosaurs to them suddenly taking the place of an intelligent minority group in society).

All that Theodore Rex has going for it is the cuteness of its concept and that is simply not enough to carry it. The dinosaur suit effects are reasonably good but the dinosaurs are played and voiced with a simplicity that makes them into little more than live-action cartoon characters – indeed, the dinosaur characters look almost identical to the talking dinosaurs in the live-action sitcom Dinosaurs (1991-4). The character of Theodore Rex and the inanity of the banter between he and Whoopi Goldberg tires quickly. That there are dinosaurs in the story is almost of no significance – the character of Theodore could have been played by a vastly obese, a wheelchair-ridden person or a talking goldfish for all the difference it makes. In addition, Jonathan Betuel fails to come up with a worthwhile detective story to hang everything on. The film may have been able to work with a sufficiently gonzo approach – although bizarrely enough, the idea of dinosaur detectives in the modern day was played seriously in the tv movie Anonymous Rex (2004), which is at least conducted its scenario with a certain degree of interest. However, it is hard to see what inspired people to make a turkey like this.

The usually reliable Armin Mueller-Stahl makes for a poor villain of the show, while Juliet Landau does a dire job as his assistant, seemingly trying to imitate Sarah Douglas. Whoopi Goldberg gives a sour performance. She has hardly made a good choice of parts in the past with turkeys like Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986), Fatal Beauty (1987) and The Telephone (1987), but here she seems decidedly pissed off no doubt at having to play off against a big rubber dinosaur. Indeed, there are reports that she made efforts to quit the production during filming. The sets are all colourfully overlit – they have a stagebound artificiality to them that makes the film look as though it is taking place in a children’s amusement park.