‘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, annou...

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.