“Rebirth” mostly succeeds as a “Jurassic” sequel.

My love for "Jurassic Park" is well-documented. It is a movie that had a profound effect on me when I first watched it. It is my favorite movie of all time for that, and many other reasons. It is the only truly great movie in the franchise, and each sequel has been profoundly disappointing. Yet, I have gone to see every single one, for better or worse.

In "Jurassic World: Rebirth," Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) leads a team to yet another island to get DNA samples from the largest dinosaurs to use in medical research.

"Rebirth" manages to be more entertaining than frustrating, which is not something the other sequels have accomplished. It features some fun action scenes, and the characters are less annoying than those in other sequels. The plot was pretty straightforward-"We need DNA from these three dinosaurs, and this is where they are on the island." It never tries to be more than that.

My biggest issue is that this island was where they put the rejected hybrid dinosaurs, and yet, only three are seen in the movie, and two of them are the same type. When it was revealed that they were going to an island with lab-created dinosaur hybrids, I was expecting all of them to be that. Most of the creatures we see are known dinosaurs. To top it all off, the ones we do get aren't that interesting.

"Rebirth" is one of the better sequels in this franchise. The bar for that is low, so that's not hard. It manages to be entertaining, but I am not sure what it adds to the franchise. Fair or not, every sequel is judged by the original. And by that metric, no Jurassic sequel is ever going even to come close to that high bar.

7/10

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence/action, bloody images, some suggestive references, language and a drug reference.

2h 13m