Next time your doctor asks for a blood draw, try not to think about this needle.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: for us the Jurassic Park/World film series is a Family Tradition Franchise, by which I mean — like the Marvel, DC, or Star Wars universes — ever since my son was small we’ve seen see every installment in theaters because we’ve always gone to see them every time, no matter how unenthusiastic we are about the diminishing returns. The resistible drag of IP inertia is among our strongest bonds, exactly as studio execs count on to prop up these dilapidated blockbuster assembly lines.

The last trilogy came nowhere near touching the Steven Spielberg/Michael Crichton classic, its first sequel whose flaws get funnier every time I catch a basic-cable rerun, or even Joe Johnston’s underrated yet perfectly fun JPIII. Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World was a roadshow revival presenting a handful of entertaining scenes, numerous derivative ideas in the form of “callbacks”, the first of Chris Pratt’s many generic action heroes to come, the callous murder of poor innocent Lena Luthor, and a T-Rex/raptor team-up that was probably the first line of the pitch. With Fallen Kingdom J.A. Bayona arguably crafted the least worst of the three, with a wild Dinosaur Island cataclysm that segues to the bizarre high-concept “dinosaurs in a haunted house”, only to fumble in the final ten minutes with one of the stupidest movie endings so far this millennium. Trevorrow returned one last time for Dominion, a Jurassic All-Stars cash-grab reunion tour in which our beloved dinosaurs played second-fiddle to the threat of giant locusts, to the delight of that microscopic Venn-diagram subset, Jurassic Fans Who Hate Dinosaurs.

Three years later, here we go again! Those hungry, hungry dinos are back in their seventh chapter, Jurassic World Rebirth — courtesy of sci-fi director Gareth Edwards (The Creator, most of Rogue One), who learned a few things from directing an actual Godzilla film such as “perhaps a giant-lizard movie should have more than five minutes of giant lizard in it” and “always cast a Marvel actor”. Joining him is David Koepp, primary screenwriter of the first Jurassic trilogy, which movie-news sites took as a good sign even though his last blockbuster credit was among the Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny brain trust. The results manage to hurdle the low bar set by Trevorrow’s two company-man products, but once again Edwards and Koepp aspire to a cover-band quality level, which doesn’t have to be an entirely bad thing.

After a brief prologue of Final Destination equipment failure and perfunctory creature-feature foreshadowing, we pick up in the not-too-distant future with the filmmakers copping to Fallen Kingdom‘s fatal flaw by reversing it in the most ignominious way possible: an all-text Dragnet update to the effect of “THE DINOSAURS DIED ON THE WAY BACK TO THEIR HOME CONTINENTS.” A logical (if obvious) combo of War of the Worlds infections and mild springtime temps are all it took for the promise of mini-kaiju marauding cities and towns to be broken, along with the hearts of in-universe children worldwide. The great resurrection ruined dinosaur mystique and led to market saturation and burnout, thus probably forcing 90% of children’s museums into either bankruptcy or replacing their fossil exhibits with “Remember When…?” Gen-X toy collections. Summed up in one clever scene of big-city gridlock caused by the sprawling blockage of a dying apatosaurus (or some other “don’t call it brontosaurus” species), this new extinction event barely ever matters again.

Remember all your favorite old Jurassic scientists who took turns returning for the sequels? Don’t bother! Other than one quick name-check, Rebirth sends a new crew into danger and guaranteed box-office success. Former superhero Scarlet Johansson (whose posthumous swan song Black Widow remains among Marvel’s post-Endgame best) is a mercenary with a heart of gold, Jonathan Bailey (Wicked‘s Fiyero) is The Scientist, and Academy Award Winner Mahershala Ali (Green Book, House of Cards) is The Boat-Owner and Disposable Minion Provider. Three classy actors do what they can in the usual sort of big-budget project where “mourns a dead loved one for years” qualifies as a kind of personality.

They’re each hired by Rupert Friend (Obi-Wan Kenobi, Companion), whose Greedy Pharma-Bro desires genetic samples from the three largest prehistoric beasts still alive in the faraway, dino-hospitable equatorial environments — one beast by land, one by sea, and one in air — so he can cure heart problems and get even richer, not necessarily in that order. He’s the sort of billionaire that exists only in movies: one who sends himself out into the field in harm’s way alongside his contractors.

Apropos of the series, their target destination is still another forgotten island from the InGen mad-science archipelago, whose core is a sci-tech village abandoned seventeen years ago (though the cars and battery-powered equipment still fire up just fine) with a product-placement convenience store not yet looted by the wildlife and where everyday objects ranging from inflatable life rafts to Snickers™ wrappers were all manufactured from indestructible carbon-fiber materials capable of destroying heavy machinery from within and thwarting a T-Rex’s gaping maw. Well, either carbon-fiber or movie magic.

So one-half of the film is literally a video-game fetch quest with three (3) items necessary to earn the “Heart Health, Hard Wealth” achievement. The other half is a Land of the Lost reboot: Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (Netflix’s 6 Underground and The Lincoln Lawyer) is a dad taking a happy boating trip with his two non-custodial daughters (including Luna Blaise from NBC’s Manifest) and one deadbeat boyfriend (Dead Boy Detectives‘ David Iacono) who’ll either learn a lesson about responsibility or die horribly. Their ship drifts too closely toward the forbidden latitudes of dinosaur doom and runs afoul of CGI monstrosities that just so happen to be in Our Heroes’ path. But then the family spins off and has an entire B-plot to themselves until the final act, when a predictable minion shortage (three guesses why!) leaves the film running low on characters in distress, a gap they were born to unwittingly fill.

With the destruction of Isla Nublar in Fallen Kingdom and Isla Sorna being basically tamed at the end of The Lost World, Mysterious Island III is Ile Saint-Hubert, whose namesake was the patron saint of “hunters, mathematicians, opticians and metalworkers“. (The latter might explain the Snickers wrapper.) We’re told this is the island where InGen dumped all the rejects from their experiments to create bigger, badder, cooler new dinos for their theme parks, which begs the question: just what were their criteria that let Indominus Rex make the cut in the first JW? As with every installment, there must be one brand new, big-bad super-scary Final Boss Super-Dino: this year’s model is known only in-movie on its containment label as “D.Rex”, though extratextually the full name in the script or press kit is apparently Distortus Rex. InGen’s formula for this misshapen stalker in the shadows is one part Moria cave troll, two parts xenomorph, and one part Domo-Kun. Its Stygian sequences echo the chilling Darth Vader coda from Edwards’ Rogue One, though Vader was scarier and racked up a higher body count. (If subsequent filmmakers keep milking the “bigger = better” exponential formula, by the ninth film they’ll be facing Godzilla with a redrawn face.)

By and large, the populace of InGen’s supposed defective-dino dumping ground are just…ordinary dinosaurs? Not even modified? An average ankylosaurus pops out of the shadows, but we can’t tell if he has polka dots or square wheels or for some reason he’s named Charliesaur. Among the colossi they seek are Quetzalcoatlus, which are just winged velociraptors (nakedly so toward the end), but they do enjoy a vertiginous Cliffhanger throwdown. Most of the critters are returnees, as in the lengthy chase sequence involving JW‘s invincible mosasaurus and an entire school of spinosauruses — JPIII‘s singular headliner, demoted to Jaws-like sidekicks. The chase gets more exciting as it goes, but all its predators are encores. A basic raptor, that fan-favorite slasher-dino of yore, gets a mere cameo that mocks its obsolescence, while its onetime tag-team partner the T-Rex ambushes its way into a confrontation that’s tense and plain silly. On the bright side, kids will love the inclusion of one plush-sized cute baby pet dino, now available in stores because why else is it in there!

As usual, Edwards’ attentions are reserved more for the CG creations (seemingly impeccably drawn, in our non-upgraded theater’s format) than for any of the humans. Some bits ring true, if not quite new, such as the standard “valley of the majestic longneck herd” panoramic shot that tries reminding us of the last three times this shot accompanied a Jurassic Park OG-theme reprise. Johansson tries her darnedest to play up a shred of moral grey in her mercenary greed and resists going full-on maternal when the kids-in-danger show up, but we know she can’t hold out forever. By the end we realize we’re rooting more for the actors than for the characters they’re playing, as they cycle through the motions backed by composer Alexander Desplat fronting a John Williams cover-orchestra playing the hits. (I may have laughed a little too hard when they cut to a single, sensitively tinkling piano while Our Heroes compare nominal dead-loved-one backstories.)

Jurassic World Rebirth is incrementally more than the sum of its refurbished parts, with fewer aggravatingly idiotic plot turns than the last few and just enough skillfully workmanlike pep that casual popcorn-flick lovers should be fine with it, especially families that raise their kids to super-love dinosaurs and can afford a theater outing. Anyone wishing for better than that might be a little more frustrated. The basic framework is as rusty as ever — just another team of fragile flesh-bags fleeing much larger creatures they cannot possibly kill, running and running and running like they’re trapped in a Doctor Who episode and forgot to invite a single scientist capable of building a weapon that can pierce those dense scales or at least a super awesome giant-lizard-fighting mech-suit. I guess they had to save something for the next sequel trilogy after this one.

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Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Ed Skrein, the big-bad of the first Deadpool and Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon, simmers with too much personality for a mere gun-toting henchman, but no one asks him to let loose. The tinier of the two daughters is Audrina Miranda, who recently did two episodes of Criminal Minds, so she’s working on building that resume.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Jurassic World Rebirth end credits, but they confirm the role or Ile Saint-Hubert was played by Malta and Thailand, itemize every conceivable production participant down to naming Miranda’s on-set tutor, and fade out to the lulling sounds of insects in the wilderness. The implicit threat is either “Nature is still out there, birthing its next marketable predator” or “JURASSIC LOCUSTS WILL RETURN.”