Overview: Five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, the planet’s ecology has proven largely inhospitable to dinosaurs. Those remaining exist in isolated equatorial environments with climates resembling the one in which they once thrived.

The three most colossal creatures within that tropical biosphere hold the key to a drug that will bring miraculous life-saving benefits to humankind.

Verdict: What looked like a promising reboot of the Jurassic Park/World franchise leads to arguably the worst film of the series with Jurassic World: Rebirth, a boring, useless retread of the same old, same old.

Man re-creates dinosaurs; man screws up in containing re-created dinosaurs; and Scarlett Johansson fails to provide a spark while pursuing and/or avoiding said dinosaurs.

Director Gareth Edwards did some fine work with the Godzilla reboot but fails to find a sense of purpose when he’s given a menagerie of beasties. Don’t blame ScarJo for the maddeningly boring developments in this 134-minute monstrosity. That blame goes to the folks who did the casting around her, and David Koepp, the guy who did the writing (the man who wrote the first two Jurassic Park movies). Yes, plenty of blame has to go to the normally reliable Edwards, too.

Johansson plays Zora, a mysterious mercenary hired by a sleazy corporate guy named Martin (Rupert Friend) to go to yet another secret dino island, to retrieve some mutant dino DNA that will be used to create heart medicine to save the world. (Gimme a freaking break!) This island is an alternate facility where they were making mutant hybrid dinosaurs, a topic already addressed in the first Jurassic World, although that’s seemingly ignored in this film.

Jonathan Bailey plays Henry Loomis, aka the Science Guy. We know he’s a scientist, because he wears glasses. Mahershala Ali plays Duncan, another mercenary guy—the mercenary who won’t die first, because his paycheck is bigger than the others.

If this band of mercenaries going to a dino island (a mutant dino island, mind you) was all we had to deal with, maybe this film could’ve been a little tighter, and maybe we could’ve had something passable. Nope: We get Manuel Garcia-Rulfo playing Reuben, the Worst Dad in the World who sails his daughters and one of their boyfriends into a part of the ocean swarming with humongous dino beasts. They, of course, get attacked, but rather than getting eaten, they survive and wind up being an albatross around the neck of this movie’s pacing. ScarJo and team rescue them, but nobody rescues us from their lame dialogue and absolutely brainless actions.

The dinos are a mixed bag. The flying raptor-type things that are supposed to be the primary baddies aren’t all that interesting. A T-rex does make an appearance in the film’s best sequence involving a river raft chase. I’m not saying it’s all that exciting. It’s just the best thing this lousy movie has to offer.

The final monster payoff is a mutant dino that looks like a combo of the Alien xenomorph and Return of the Jedi’s rancor. It looks so much like those two creatures that Edwards has said publicly that the monster was “inspired” by the rancor. More like cloned.

We see that monster briefly in the film’s intro. A major mishap causes the monster to get out of its original container and commit some felonies. That said, when the sequence ends, it’s clear that the monster is contained in a secondary compartment.

So how does the monster get out and, decades later, attack the characters in Rebirth? Did everybody in the facility just run away and leave it with the keys to the door? Even if the monster got out, wouldn’t somebody or something make sure it got “put down” after murdering a dude in a hazmat suit? I know—I’m overthinking it, but this movie put that in my head in the first 10 minutes. By the time the film ended, I couldn’t accept or enjoy the monster mayhem, because I was always questioning it. I ruin things that way.