An entertaining but meandering sequel.

I have a pretty low bar when it comes to the Jurassic Park franchise. Fun action, people getting chased by dinosaurs, cool CGI creatures—that's really all I need. And in that regard, the latest installment in the Jurassic World series, Jurassic World: Rebirth, delivered. It wasn't amazing, but it was good enough for a summer popcorn movie.

The film focuses on a team venturing into the off-limits equatorial zone where the surviving dinosaurs have taken up residence after their escape in Fallen Kingdom. Their mission: to acquire DNA samples from three specific colossal species for a pharmaceutical company.

Things start strong with a tense flashback scene to a lab incident. It hearkens back to the opening scene of Jurassic Park where the worker is killed by the Velociraptor, right down to the way we only catch glimpses of the deadly dino. But after that, there's a long stretch of exposition. We're told about the public's waning interest in dinosaurs. We're told that dino DNA is the key to modern miracle drugs. We're told that Zora Bennett (played by Scarlett Johansson) is a badass mercenary and Henry Loomis (played by Jonathan Bailey) is a paleontologist whose museum is on the rocks. That's an awful awful lot of "telling" and not much "showing", and the result is underwhelming.

Once the team gets moving, the pacing picks up, but the characterization never does. There are a few nice scenes between Zora and her old friend Duncan (played by Mahershala Ali), and I wish the film had spent more time leaning into their friendship. As for the rest of the team? You're just taking bets on which of them are going to be dino chow.

Instead of developing the main crew more, the movie spends a lot of time cutting back and forth between their mission and a completely separate set of people. The Delgado family are sailing across the Atlantic when their journey is rudely interrupted by an aquatic dinosaur. Although the crew and family stories do intersect, they never felt like a cohesive whole. It almost felt like watching two separate films that happened to take place in the same vicinity.

I actually liked the Delgados. Family drama. Ordinary people caught completely unprepared in a perilous situation. Emotional character arcs. There was a lot to be mined here, and I would have been perfectly happy with a Jurassic World film focused solely on them. But by splitting time between their story and the mercenaries, both got short-changed.

Despite all that, there was still a lot to like about the movie. The new mutant dinosaurs had a creepy vibe—sort of Jurassic Park meets Aliens—and they held their own alongside old favorites like the Mosasaurus. The acting was solid, especially from Johansson and Ali. Zora has some fun butt-kicking moments. And the three quests to retrieve samples from an air, sea, and land dinosaur led to great action set pieces.

I just wish the same effort could have been put into the characters. It would be hard to top the original movie's iconic group, but nothing in the franchise since has even come close. I just want characters I can get invested in, so I care whether or not they get eaten. This one was more like: "Well, there goes that guy. What was his name again?"

(I still don't know most of their names, to be honest.)