From the start, The Lost World is plagued by a weak and somewhat confused plot. At the beginning of the film, we find the reluctant hero of Jurassic Park, Dr. Ian Malcolm (expertly played by Jeff Goldblum), being forced into another dubious mission concerning bio-engineered dinosaurs by John Hammond (the naive billionaire from Jurassic Park). His mission this time is to ostensibly observe (as before) the interaction of the new ecological system and give advice based on his experiences. Of course, Dr. Malcolm knows from his previous experience what he and his new team would be getting into, and quickly declines to have anything to do with it. He changes his mind after it is revealed that his girlfriend is already on the island and determines to go along in order to (as he sees it) rescue her. Malcolm approaches his task with grim foreboding and incessant warnings, which are continually disregarded by all until it is too late. Adding to this is the contrived subplot of Malcolm's neglected daughter (an African-American), who feels compelled to stow away on board the team's command vehicle in order to get attention from her father. This seems to be an awkward attempt to provide a politically correct character in which children could identify and an innocent victim who could bring out the parental instincts of the main characters (i.e. Newt and Ripley in Aliens). In the end, she merely proves to be an annoyance and a distraction from the story.

If this were not convoluted enough, somewhere in the middle of the movie, a very large and well-equipped group of mercenaries and big-game hunters, sponsored by Hammond's company In-Gen, drops in on the island in order to hunt and capture live dinosaurs and bring them back to the mainland. At the top of the list is a live Tyrannosaurus Rex. Needless to say, the results are predictable and the hunters become the hunted. As the number of casualties increases, Malcolm's team joins with the mercenaries as a matter of necessity in order to escape the island with their lives. The rest of the movie is spent dodging dinosaurs and hiking to an abandoned base, which just so happens to be in the midst of a nest of Velociraptors. The scene where the vicious raptors stalk and eventually attack the survivors from all sides is one of the high points of the movie. The climax of the film occurs only after a series of improbable and completely stupid moves on the part of the evil company and their mercenaries, and is interesting in that a lot more could have been done with the premise than was actually attempted. This final scenario proved to be a huge disappointment, and not very satisfying at all.

Despite the confusing plot, Goldblum does an excellent job with his character, playing Malcolm as a haunted but still smug individual who gets the satisfaction of saying "I told you so." The film is also redeemed somewhat by the awesome special effects which surpass those in Jurassic Park. The dinosaurs could have been real for all intents and purposes, but I couldn't help but notice that the Velociraptors seemed smaller and less intelligent than those in the previous movie. In the end, however, the convoluted plot and endless clichés doom The Lost World to mediocrity. All of the special effects Hollywood can ever produce on million-dollar graphics intensive computers can never save a film with a weak plot.