Adam Driver stars in sci-fi adventure 65 about a pilot who goes on a space expedition in order to afford a cure for his sick daughter back home. His ship crash-lands on an unknown planet: Earth, 65 million years ago. 

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On paper, Adam Driver vs Dinosaurs... In Space (my title's better) sounds like a riot. A gloriously old-fashioned Cowboys Vs Aliens-style nonsensical mishmash. The trailer, however, promised something else: a grittier version of this, with lots of dinosaur action and a father-daughter-survive-the-wilderness scenario, to add some heart into the mix. Somehow, the result wound up as After Earth meets a million other movies. Adam Driver is a great choice for a film like this; a better one than this; and he is good in this role: he brings just the right amount of toughness, humanity and desperation to his character, and handles the action sequences really well.

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Alas, even one of the very best actors in Hollywood working today can't save this film, directed by the writers of A Quiet Place, which refuses to entertain at all cost. The film seems almost ashamed of itself, hyper-focused on trying to tell an almost clichéd tragic father-daughter survival plot, uncomfortably throwing dinosaur toys in our faces - presumably to wake us up - instead of delivering the goods. As unlikely as the plot sounds, it's in fact even more unbelievably silly than you thought as [SPOILERS] our hero finds himself not only in space, not only a long time ago (again), but on a dinosaur planet mere hours before a meteor is about to hit it. We've all been there, I guess.

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65 begged to be a much more larger-than-life beast than this. Granted, the action scenes where Driver faces off against dinosaurs are decent enough, but there is just not enough spectacle here to be a film you'd either wanna see on a Friday night with friends or at home just hanging out. It's awake just enough to remind you the movie is still going. 65 is a nice-looking film with two solid performances leading the way (as annoying as those characters' dynamic is) and it should have been bold, not only in its premise (space man v dinosaurs), but in its ideas and visuals too. Even as a moving drama, this doesn't hit the mark as plot and characters remain unfleshed out, and not in a cool spaghetti western kind of way. Too much time is spent quietly building suspense for rather un-frightening (and unoriginal) events.

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There are worse science fiction films than this one but this is not much of anything, a passable B-movie at best. 65 had a cool idea and a damn good actor to do it with but the clumsy tone and underwritten script leave this one as cold as the Ice Age.