The seventh film in this franchise was released on Wednesday as Jurassic World: Rebirth found its way into theaters for the Fourth of July weekend.

With Scarlet Johansson and Mahershala Ali leading the cast, Jurassic World: Rebirth resets the franchise after the seemingly final film Jurassic World: Dominion.

It is five years past the events of Jurassic World: Dominion, where it seemed as if the humans and the dinosaurs were going to be living in the same world. Turned out that was not going to work out for the dinos as they found out that living on earth was bad for them and they had to move closer to the equator.

A group of mercenaries led by Zora Bennett (Scarlet Johansson) and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) went to the island where all the worst of the dinosaurs, the weird mutates from the science experiments were cast out in a chance find DNA of certain dino monsters that can help cure diseases.

Also, there was a family who were out sailing (I guess near the equator) and a dinosaur in the water caused their boat to capsize. They also wound up on this mutant monster island (no Godzilla or Kong to be found). The two groups cross paths at the beginning.

While there are so many problems with this movie, I’ll start with some of the good things. I thought there were some good action scenes or dinosaur chases sequences. There was a scene with a dinosaur and a inflatable raft that was fairly tense. Some of the action was pretty good.

I think Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali are charismatic performers and I like cheering for them. Of course, I was cheering for them because I like them as actors, not because they have characters that I enjoyed. We’ll get back to the characters in a bit.

Unfortunately, that was about it for positives for me. I found myself bored quite a bit at the beginning of the movies. I thought these characters were all just bland and one-dimensional and if they weren’t played by familiar and likable faces, I wouldn’t care about these people at all.

The dinosaurs were not really dinosaurs. They are actually just monsters and most of the designs were okay at best. There were several times when you could easily see the green screen. Some of the monsters were cool and looked good on the screen, but just not enough. Give me more of the T-Rex instead.

The film basically had two stories crammed together in the movie that really did not have any crossover. The mercenaries after the DNA is one story and the family stranded on the island is the other. There was not enough story for either one of them, let alone for both.

There are so many moments in this movie that were basically recycled from the original three films, just tweaked a bit. There really was not anything new or original in the movie.

Rupert Friend’s character is right out of the stereotypical playbook for this type of film. You could easily see what this guy was going to do a mile away.

I’m not even going to comment on Delores.

I was very disappointed, but not surprised at Jurassic Park: Rebirths, which is more like Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla and less like Rogue One. Bringing David Koepp back in (who was a writer on the classic and iconic original Jurassic Park) did not help this franchise at all. It did have a few moments that were decent, but certainly not enough for a two hour and fifteen minute slog.

2.6 stars