‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ review: toothless reboot fails to recapture the magic

This year’s lively blockbuster season began in April with Ryan Coogler’s mighty Sinners and has shown little sign of calming down. The latest Mission: Impossible delivered more hair-rising Tom Cruise hijinks while both Brad Pitt’s high-octane racing romp F1 The Movie and Danny Boyle’s wild horror hit 28 Years Later have been box office smashes.  With talented action director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) leading an accomplished cast including Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali, there was justifiable excitement that Jurassic World Rebirth would keep the roaring successes coming.

Rebirth picks things up after humans were forced to co-exist with escaped dinosaurs following the events of 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion. It’s only been a few short years but most people are bored by the terrible lizards that are now part of their day-to-day lives. Not untrustworthy big pharma rep Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) though, who wants covert-ops specialist Zora Bennett (Johansson) to hunt down dinosaurs living on a tropical Caribbean island and harvest their blood in exchange for $10 million.

The pair assemble a motley crew that includes Bennet’s old military pal Duncan Kincaid (Ali) and paleontologist Doctor Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) before heading to the dangerous Ile Saint-Huber.  The island used to hold a dinosaur research facility so there’s a bunch of gnarly, mutated species living there. Krebs reckons each beast holds the secret to creating important drugs that will save countless lives and hopefully boost the profits of his firm, ParkerGenix.

The fact each blood sample has to be extracted from the three biggest dinosaur species (one each from the sea, air and land) is challenging enough but Jurassic World Rebirth really step up a gear when the team diverts from their mission to check out a distress signal. Turns out there’s a family stranded at sea after a violent clash with a dinosaur who could really do with some help.

Whether this seventh film in the Jurassic… franchise is actually necessary is moot. It’s like watching a Scream film. If you’re into them, they’re always fun. Even a bad one is still a good laugh. And, sure enough, there are some spectacular sequences of monster peril across Ile Saint-Hubert. After the tepid first act and a merely decent middle, the final stretch is truly nail-biting and put together with the kind of panache we expect from Edwards, whose last film The Creator deserved to be far more widely seen than it was.

Double-Oscar-winner Ali and Johansson are typically reliable, even if they probably know the material is beneath their considerable skill set. The juiciest role belongs to sleazebag corporate scumbag Krebs, who is played deliciously by Friend.

Action and acting, then, all good. Unfortunately – and bizarrely, given screenwriter David Koepp co-wrote the original Jurassic Park among other great blockbusters – the dialogue throughout Jurassic World Rebirth is very patchy, as if his first draft script made it to the screen. Maybe the shoot was rushed, maybe the sign-off process wasn’t as tightly managed as these things should be, but it makes the entire film feel slightly odd. It’s a shame as this downgrades a very entertaining film to an average one.