‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ reveals a franchise more brain-dead than ever

[NEW YORK] In Jurassic World Rebirth, we are told it’s been 32 years since dinosaurs were brought back to life and now all humans are bored with them. Well, the truth is the dinosaurs are not really the problem. This franchise is.

The latest entry is a reboot of the reboot that trudges along at a deathly dull pace towards making millions of US dollars at the box office. Even the introduction of a monstrous hybrid dino that looks, hilariously, like a T-rex crossed with a bloated xenomorph from Alien cannot make this thing any less sleepy. There’s dumb fun, like the best of the last trilogy, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which put dinos in the trappings of a haunted house film. And then there’s just dumb. This falls into the latter category.

It’s disappointing because there was reason to be slightly optimistic about this instalment. For one, it brought back original Jurassic Park scribe David Koepp, who’s recently been making delightful small-scale genre experiments with Steven Soderbergh, such as the sexy spy thriller Black Bag. Gareth Edwards was given director duties, and that guy knows big scaly things, having taken on Godzilla in 2014. And then there’s the cast, which includes talented performers such as Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey looking adorable in tiny little glasses, which indicate that he is, indeed, a nerd and not just a super-handsome movie star.

Jurassic World Rebirth was created to be the kind of summer thrill ride that will still draw people into multiplexes, ideally with a 4DX upcharge and viral popcorn bucket. I have no doubt it will be the cash cow it’s intended to be. Too bad it’s so boring.

Why? Well, that’s thanks to the plot. Not only have people gotten tired of dinosaurs, the dinosaurs themselves have also failed to adapt to the modern climate. (One of the most evocative images Edwards creates is a sickly brontosaurus collapsing in New York City.)

The surviving dinosaurs mostly live in a region near the equator where they can still thrive. No one really goes there, but our intrepid heroes are forced to when pharmaceutical rep Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) comes a-calling.

You see, Martin’s employer is looking to make a medication using dino DNA that can cure heart disease, but they need samples from living dinosaurs. As such, he recruits a mercenary named Zora Bennett (Johansson), a scientist named Henry Loomis (Bailey) to help ID the correct species, and a swaggering boat captain, Duncan Kincaid (Ali). There are other people on the journey, but they are not played by particularly famous people and so you know they are going to end up eaten.

Before we get to the rampaging beasties, Koepp’s screenplay gives us tedious sequences of dialogue that emphasise just how sad everyone is. Zora recently lost a colleague (during a comically vague training mission in Yemen) and did not attend her mother’s funeral. Duncan’s kid died and he split with his wife. Henry is working in a profession no one cares about anymore. Boo hoo.

These moments are supposed to endear us to the trio, who stand in contrast to the greedy Martin, but the scenes are dramatically inert. Just as the team is about to reach its first reptilian target, they all get some company when they rescue a stranded family whose boat was overturned by a giant, crocodile-like mosasaurus – you know, the dino in the first Jurassic World.

SEE ALSO

Brad Pitt’s ‘F1’ cruises to top of North American box office

‘Mission: Impossible’ composer Lalo Schifrin dies aged 93

Now why was divorced dad Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) taking his kids on a trip from Barbados to Cape Town in prehistoric-animal-infested waters? Many people ask that question, but there’s no good answer. He might be a terrible dad.

Still, the main reasoning for this storyline seems to be that the Jurassic movies must have an adorable tyke in peril, and that role is fulfilled by Audrina Miranda, who plays Reuben’s younger daughter, Isabella. She even, eventually, gets a cute, tiny dino sidekick that looks like a mini triceratops, whom she names Dolores.

Eventually, all these folks land on an abandoned island that used to be a research facility where the corporation InGen cooked up genetic mashups to lure people to the parks. Naturally, that plan went poorly so now the land is inhabited by supersize baddies in addition to the classics. There are moments of wonder and times when everyone has to flee screaming.

We have seen some version of these beats before, and none are ever handled as well as they were in the Spielberg classic. The action is perfunctory. And, while there’s at least one clever showdown involving a yellow life raft versus a T-rex, largely the stakes feel very small, even while the creatures are very big. It quickly becomes clear the movie isn’t going to dispatch any of the major characters, and even if it did, they are all so thinly drawn it would be hard to care.

So by the time the towering so-called D-rex shows up with its balloon-like head, it’s hard to get nervous about the terror it’s supposed to instil. It mostly just looks seriously goofy. But, alas, there are no camp pleasures to be found in Jurassic World Rebirth, just lacklustre attempts at thrills. You will wish you were extinct.