'Jurassic World Rebirth' Gets Back To Basics: Hungry Dinosaurs

Seven movies and 32 years in, the Jurassic Park franchise has become wholly generic. How generic? The latest offering, "Jurassic World Rebirth,” announces itself as a reboot in the title itself. Here's the thing, though: Just as the Walgreens version of cold medicine has the same ingredients and same effect as the better-known name brands, so this movie grinds the series down to the fundamentals and does the job. Art it ain't, but "Rebirth” works at the level of Pavlovian reflex, and it'll make pots of money. Why? Because dinosaurs.

Admittedly, they're an ugly bunch this time around - mutant beasties whose DNA was fiddled with by foolish scientists before the latter got eaten and left their experiments to cook for a few decades on a remote Pacific island. Why would anyone want to go there? Beats me, but the script by David Koepp - the writer of the original "Jurassic Park” (1993) and its 1997 sequel, returning to the scene of the crime - works hard to convince us to care for his cartoonish characters, and the cast adds shadings where they can. (Original director Steven Spielberg is on board as executive producer and a reminder of better days.)

There's a corporate baddie, of course: Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), representing a Big Pharma company that needs blood samples from the three largest dinosaurs of land, sea and air for an experimental heart disease serum. Martin has hired Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a hard-bitten black-ops mercenary with a gooey center, and Zora has hired her old friend Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), who has a boat and a crew of what they used to call "red shirts” on the old "Star Trek” TV show. Pure dino kibble.

In the requisite Hot Nerd Paleontologist role is Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey of "Bridgerton”), minus Jeff Goldblum's sardonic one-liners, unfortunately. And because all Jurassic Park/World movies need an imperiled child or two, here's the Delgado family, rescued after a dinosaur-related disaster at sea: Dad Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), teenage daughter Teresa (Luna Blaise), Teresa's boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono, effectively the movie's comic relief) and little tyke Isabella (Audrina Miranda), who aces her assignment of screaming well.

These are the characters Koepp and director Gareth Edwards ("Rogue One,” the 2014 "Godzilla”) queue up like bait on a fishing line, and while there's a bit of dramatic development - Zora thinks about growing a conscience, Xavier has a hidden streak of resourcefulness - it's only there to fill the downtime between meals.

Remember the scenes in "King Kong” - the 1933 original or Peter Jackson's 2005 remake - where the ship's crew has to cross Kong Island while getting picked off by big, toothy carnivores? That's "Jurassic World Rebirth” in a nutshell, and that's all it is. The surprise is how effective those sequences of peril are and how powerfully they hammer on a moviegoer's primordial brain stem, releasing a flood of fight-or-flight adrenaline.

An attack of a whalelike mosasaur and its hunting buddies, lithe and lethal spinosauruses, is shot and edited like the theme park ride it almost certainly will be. (I'm not saying that's a bad thing.) A climb down this movie's version of the Cliffs of Insanity to retrieve a pterodactyl's egg is equally hair-raising. "Rebirth” recycles elements of the earlier movies, and, other than the news that T. Rexes can swim, it makes no claims to originality. It just wants to leave you thoroughly, happily wrung out by the end.

(Correction: There is one fresh bit. A scene of two immense titanosauruses curling their necks around each other in a loving pair bond, their whiplike tails performing a kind of saurian ballet, is unexpectedly moving.)

Advances in digital effects over three decades have resulted in dinosaurs that are more fluidly believable, I guess, but the creatures of the earlier movies constitute a beauty pageant compared to this mob, which includes a carnotaurus with what appears to be a goiter and a "Distortus Rex” with a forehead on loan from the Xenomorph in "Aliens.” Postproduction FX work on "Rebirth” was reportedly shortened to meet a summer release, and you can tell in the sketchiness of the creature design.

None of it matters: Not the unsightly dinosaurs, the anonymous characters, the slumming movie star or even Alexandre Desplat's score, which takes the most headache-inducing themes from John Williams's original "Jurassic Park” music and amps them up to 11. You get your summer-movie money's worth in baseline neuro-stim thrills from "Jurassic World Rebirth,” and that's what counts. They'll keep cranking these movies out as long as there are 8-year-old boys - and audiences that pay to be treated like one.

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