By Iloz Zoc

How does one describe a movie that's bland? And believe me, I'm fighting the temptation to go off on a tangent with sentences with the word 'crock' in them. While that might help spice the review, it's an obvious but cheap shot. Oh, hell...This movie is a crock. What makes it a crock is its bland by the numbers characters and action, superficial dialog that's by the letters, and less than stellar computer graphics work that reminds you how bland everything else is. It also has that annoying kid from Lizzie McGuire, Jake Thomas.

Thomas actually does as good a job as any of the other actors, but he's not given much to do. At least they didn't spike his hair. But now that you've got me started, what about his dog, Lucky? Yes, that dog, the one with three legs called Lucky. Will someone yell at the scriptwriter for me please? Thomas spends the movie — mostly riding around on his bike — looking for Lucky, the three-legged, runaway dog. If that weren't bad enough, there's the evil corporation, Gereco — stop me if you've heard this one — conducting secret genetic experiments on man-eating monsters. What, rabbits too hard for them? So these experiments blend the genes, by accident of course (wink, wink), of a Sarcosuchus (don't even go there) and a dinosaur. It promptly escapes its holding pen because an idiot scientist walks right in -- as it's killing everything else in the pen -- leaves the door wide open, and gets her throat ripped out as she tries zapping it with a pocket-sized stun gun.

Hey, you, stop that groaning, I'm not done yet — there's more.Joanna Pacula plays the usual 'evil mouthpiece' for Gereco who denies everything while they send their top man-eating monster hunter to recapture it. Using Lucky, the three-legged dog for bait — oh, so that's what happened to Lucky — Lucky really is lucky, and high-tails it just as the hunter gets eaten, leaving only his legs behind. The CGI blur happens so fast, I can see why they spend more time just doting on those legs.

Anyway, one of the highlights in this film, and that's stretching it a mile, is what unexpectedly happens to Thomas as he goes searching for Lucky late at night in Gereco's wildlife preserve.They spent a little more time on the CGI with that one, but it ends pretty abruptly. What really should have ended abruptly were the dialog exchanges between the crocodile hunter they bring in (Costos Mandylor), the Grant's Lake Animal Shelter control officer (Jane Longenecker), and Thomas' brother (Matt Borlenghi). The action, what little there is of it, bogs down when an old romance — queue the piano tinkling — is rekindled, and the croc hunter tries some really bad pick-up lines.

A predictable, insert scene here, time-killer has two drunk hunters poaching on the Gereco wildlife preserve; scratch two poachers. To speed things up, the Gereco scientist hunting the monster spills the beans about the whole mess to Longenecker and Borlenghi, and they quickly volunteer to help him. As they search in the preserve, they come across a pile of man-eating monster doo-doo and the scientist quips "Holy sh*t." I swear I'm not making this up. If I were making this up it would be a hell of a lot better, I can tell you that.Dinocroc Vision kicks in as the monster gets hungry. I don't mind monster-point-of-view shots — I loved the Snake 'o Vision in Snakes on a Plane -- but here it's not very inspired and overly budget-conscious. Why bother? Another thing that annoyed me was how all these would-be hunters carried single-shot rifles. What, automatics would've blown the budget? The thing's as big as a mobile home, you know.