Jurassic World Rebirth (M) – 133 minutes

Box office success spawns sequels.

Dinosaurs have always been big business, so why would the studio stop at the trilogy of Jurassic World movies?

Now, three years after Jurassic World Dominion, we have a reboot.

The series kicked off with three Jurassic Park movies, starting in 1993, before Jurassic World came along in 2015.

The events depicted in Jurassic World Rebirth take place five years after those shown in Dominion.

Dinosaur exhibitions no longer attract interest.

Dinosaurs themselves have all but died out (again), except for those still in existence in an isolated equatorial environment.

It is there that the key figures in this movie head.

The reason has everything to do with money.

A pharmaceutical conglomerate with deep pockets has no compunction about going off grid (illegal though that is) to try to tap into the DNA of the biggest dinosaurs.

Why? Because it is in the hunt to develop a game-changing drug, which can evolve from the samples of dinosaurs they need to obtain.

The man with deep pockets from the firm is Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend).

He puts the feelers out to secure mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johannson).

She will be joined by palaeontologist Dr Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey).

Their job is to extract blood samples from the largest dinosaurs on land, beneath the sea and in the air.

With them is a boat captain, Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), with whom Bennett has worked before, as well as a few others.

Suddenly, their mission is waylaid by a mayday call in the area from a father, his two daughters and his eldest daughter’s boyfriend, who have been shipwrecked.

All end up stranded on an island that is home to mutated, failed dinosaur experiments.

Let’s just say the way forward is paved with sizeable obstacles.

I quite liked the six films in the franchise before this one, especially the first.

Written by David Koepp, who co-wrote Jurassic Park with Michael Crichton, the idea of tackling dinosaurs in three different spheres is a good one.

It undoubtedly broadens the scope in a single hit.

So, too, the pharmaceutical angle, where humans stand to benefit big time and then juxtaposing that with corporate greed at any cost.

The special effects are impressive. The genuinely scary human/dinosaur interactions are what make the movie. Put simply, that is what will draw patrons into cinemas.

But as good as those interchanges are, I am afraid the plotting and dialogue leave a lot to be desired. In fact, I felt much of it was clunky.

That includes bad attempts at humour and one liners that made me squirm. Just one example: “I’m too smart to die.”

Nor am I convinced that the addition of a sailor, his two girls and the boyfriend was necessary or added anything of real value.

When they were involved, the scenes often felt try hard. The delivery was unconvincing.

Worst of all was the manufactured awkwardness between the father and her daughter’s layabout beau.

I was much more at home with the interplay between the central players, although – again – not the twee lines given to them.

So, while I appreciated the different kinds of dinosaurs and the build-up of tension and desperation, I was decidedly ho-hum about the scripting.

In short, Jurassic World Rebirth is one to see for the visual tricks.

Rated M, it scores a 6 out of 10.