“Jurassic World: Rebirth” - More like afterbirth.

Does anyone get excited for the birth of their fourth child? Or seventh? Or is it more like that feeling you get when you fit piece number two thousand in that last hole in the jigsaw puzzle? You know what I’m talking about. You were excited when you dumped the pieces out of the box and found all of the edges. You were still pretty into it as you assembled the major features of the picture. But when all was left was the monotonous portions of sky and water, you gritted your teeth and slowly, methodically tried to fit every single remaining piece into every single remaining opening, silently cussing every time a piece didn’t fit. As that last piece settled in, you felt relief at finishing it mixed with the thought “I’m never doing a puzzle again.” Is this still an analogy to having kids? You decide. Bet you’re wondering how many kids I have, aren’t you?

That’s also the entirety of the Jurassic Park/World franchise. Jurassic Park was new and exciting and awesome. Every movie after that has been increasingly disappointing to the point where you really have to question your sanity for continuing to go back for more. Heck, you’ll even lie to yourself that number four (Jurassic World) was better than most. Am I still actually talking about kids? You know you’re thinking it.

Jurassic World: Rebirth is what happens when you’ve run out of ideas. Scratch that, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is what happens when you run out of ideas. Rebirth is what happens when you have a midlife crisis and don’t care that you ran out of birth control.

Despite its title implying a reboot of the franchise, Rebirth is just another sequel in the franchise. To be fair, it does kinda-sorta reboot in that it’s five years later and Earth’s climate has killed the vast majority of the dinosaurs not living around the equator. The military isn’t trying to weaponize them, nobody is trying to sell them on the black market, and there isn’t a prehistoric locust to be found anywhere. There isn’t even a third attempt to build an amusement park or zoo around them. That leaves pharmaceuticals.

That’s right folks. This time around, dinosaurs are going to cure...checking notes...heart disease? That’s it? Nothing lofty like cancer or Alzheimer’s? And, they’re not even really going to cure it, just treat it so people can live ten to twenty years longer? I guess from a how-do-we-make-as-much-money-as-possible angle, treating heart disease would be rather lucrative. Those GLP-1 medications are making boatloads of money.

If you’re confused, the dinosaurs themselves aren’t literally curing heart disease. Though, that would be an interesting scene - a velociraptor wearing a lab coat and stethoscope walking toward a patient with a syringe. Wasn’t that a Dr. Who episode...?

[Googles for five minutes...]

Anyway...pharmaceutical executive Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) puts together a team to go on a fetch quest to obtain blood samples from three of the largest dinosaurs to ever live. Like all good video games, each dinosaur inhabits a different biome, providing a different setting for each MacGuffin. In this case sea, land, air. Why the largest animals? They lived the longest and had the biggest hearts. Why three different species? Diversity, I guess. And just to make sure you understand how video-game-like this all is, two of the three dinosaurs are the kind that want to eat them. It’s not that the filmmakers couldn’t have made an exciting movie featuring the team hunting for one elusive herbivore or even getting close enough to the land dinosaur (Titanosaurus) after overcoming a bunch of sharp teeth related obstacles. They just chose to go with the most obvious excuse to include harrowing scenes featuring a Mosasaurus (sea) and Quetzalcoatlus (air) - send the team of humans to the carnivores.

The team itself is a by-the-numbers quest team. In addition to the money guy, there’s the wheelman - boat captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), the brains - paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), the muscle/dino chow (Ed Skrein, Bechir Sylvain, Philippine Velge), and the team leader - mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson). All this sounds like a perfectly fine summer action blockbuster, right?

Here's where it gets redundant and pointless - a second group of people gets tangled up in the mission. Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is sailing across the ocean with his two daughters Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Isabella (Audrina Miranda) and Teresa’s stoner boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono). After the Mosasaurus capsizes their boat (and inexplicably doesn’t finish the job and eat them), they are rescued by Zora and crew. When they all get to the island, the two groups are separated, and the film jumps back and forth between the fetch quest crew and stupid family drama. And all because there is a clause in the franchise contract (or so I’m told) that requires children be put in peril. Don’t pretend you aren’t rooting for these annoying vestigial screenplay organs to become a dinosaur’s late-night indigestion.

Here's where it gets worse. In a nod back to Jurassic World, Rebirth features more mutant dinosaurs. One is a cross between a raptor and a pterosaur and the other is a cross between a xenomorph and a rancor. No, I’m not mixing my movies. The Distortus Rex (a name I did not make up) looks like if Return of the Jedi and Alien got drunk and, nine months later, the result was a baby no mother could love.

And that just about sums up the movie as a whole. Okay, so maybe that’s a little harsh. Rebirth isn’t the worst movie in the franchise; Jurassic World: Dominion exists. And Rebirth does have a few really fun action sequences, including our old friend the T-Rex. And, and, Johansson, Ali, Bailey, and Friend give pretty good performances when they easily could have phoned them in and nobody would have noticed or cared. But between the unnecessary Delgado family, the insipid and lazy mutant dinos, the film consisting largely of rehashing stuff from its preceding films, and two Titanosaurs getting to second base with each other as the humans watch in awe, Rebirth inspires the same question as every family with several children - are we done yet?

Rating: Ask for seventeen dollars back and call your doctor if you experience blurred vision, bleeding from the ears, involuntary eye-rolls, memory loss, a severe drop in IQ, or a strong desire to throw Junior Mints at people who unironically clap at the end of this movie.