If there’s any single flaw that has stopped every “Jurassic Park” sequel from being anywhere near as good as the 1993 original, it’s the lack of a believable cause that would make us suspend disbelief about why characters would make the same mistakes again. Making an even bigger dinosaur theme park after what happened the previous time? A recipe for disaster. Guided tours of the deserted island where the hungry dinos still roam? You’d be more likely to survive going underwater on the Titanic submersible.

And yet, even as nobody has ever argued that any sequel has matched Steven Spielberg’s inaugural entry, they keep making a billion dollars at the box office with every premiere; it’s a franchise fundamentally broke that nobody has ever seen the need to fix. Some audiences might complain that the films are getting too silly and far-fetched, but if they’re still paying to see dino carnage, then there’s no real incentive to change the ingredients in the recipe.

In this regard (and this regard only), “Jurassic World Rebirth” functions as a return-to-form for the franchise, stripping down the silliness for a back-to-basics mission where a ragtag group of scientists must venture to the world’s most dangerous island. Screenwriter David Koepp, returning to the franchise for the first time in nearly 30 years, has done his best at recreating the formula of the first movie, approaching the project in the same way as his recent collaborations with Steven Soderbergh. No, you won’t find a lot of connective tissue between the art horror “Presence” (which Looper previously reviewed) or spy thriller “Black Bag” here, but you will find an equally single-minded approach of paring a given genre down to its barest of essentials, restricting the wider world-building to contain the action. It may have felt like a low-budget screenwriting exercise in those cases, but when the self-contained aspect is an island of unruly dinosaurs as it is here, that approach is a guardrail to stop the movie becoming too overblown for its own good.

Unfortunately, this is still a “Jurassic Park” movie, and reverting to the simplicity of the original formula doesn’t hide the fact that it has long grown stale over decades of poor imitation; it’s inescapably derivative of an earlier film you’d rather be watching at any given moment. The mission this time sees paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), covert ops expert Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), and Big Pharma rep Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) getting together to visit the no-go zone in the Atlantic where dinosaurs now reside.

Research has shown that, due to their long lifespans, dinosaur genetics may hold the cure to heart disease — and as that will affect 20% of the global population in their lifetimes, it’s worth the risk if it means a major step forward in battling a fatal condition. After meeting up with a team leader who will be guiding their expedition (Mahershala Ali) along the way, the movie cuts to the Delgado family, whose paths cross with the crew after their sailboat is attacked. In a film with countless genetically mutated dinosaurs, nothing was quite as farfetched to me as a family having sailed all the way to a dangerous island near the equator from the mainland U.S. as part of a last-minute family holiday before the eldest daughter goes to college.

There is no clear narrative purpose for the Delgados beyond mimicking the original “Jurassic Park” formula, where kids are along for the ride too; the two groups get split up very soon after arriving on the island, and the movie screeches to a halt each time we have to go back to spending time with the family. Quietly, they become the real leads of the film while being a footnote in the marketing. Elsewhere, a group of charismatic movie stars are going on a “Raiders of the Lost Ark”-style adventure into tombs and caves, on their hunt for miracle dino DNA — and we’re stuck with a bland family who bloats the movie beyond its simple adventure narrative and offers nothing beyond being subjected to dinosaur attacks we’ve seen staged identically and more effectively in the previous films. They become so disconnected from the main group during the second act that it’s obvious their presence was dictated entirely by a studio note during the script stage demanding younger characters be added to appeal to the whole family. I can’t imagine any young viewer thinking that their parts were better than the actual quest itself.

Of course, neither Scarlett Johansson nor Jonathan Bailey have well-written characters to play with, but they are the exact kind of movie stars that you need to humanize thinly-sketched out archetypes like this. Rupert Friend is far more memorable as the villain, with the movie even managing to sneak in some (admittedly, very soft) criticism of for-profit healthcare as our two heroes realize any cure for a disease that affects hundreds of millions shouldn’t be sold to a businessman looking to make a potential trillion dollar windfall. But then, “Jurassic World Dominion” offered similar – albeit far messier – social commentary on climate change which was forgotten as quickly as the credits rolled. Nobody comes to these movies for anything more than carnage, and like “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” director J.A. Bayona, Gareth Edwards does occasionally lean into the full-blooded horror potential of this material.

Writing this a couple of weeks after seeing it, however, it only becomes apparent how disjointed the movie is on this front; I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that, like Marvel Studios, the action set pieces were filmed by a second unit in advance, with Edwards asked simply to stage all the sequences in between. Or it could be the other way around, as the grittier, high-stakes action scenes feel far more characteristic of the director’s previous franchise work, which aimed to ground their respective fantastical premises. There’s a goofiness to “Jurassic World Rebirth” that you won’t find elsewhere in his back catalogue and appears at odds with the large-scale spectacle most reminiscent of his earlier films.

Whereas I can still remember the smallest of grace notes from Steven Spielberg’s original years after I last saw it, everything but the biggest of the set pieces here has faded from my memory already. I suspect this sentiment will be shared by most critics, and is why Universal started screening the film for the public a full week before the critical embargo lifted — most general audiences will focus on how much fun they had in the moment, whereas critics will likely lament just how disposable the franchise increasingly continues to become. Yes, it will make a billion dollars, but by the end of the month you won’t be able to tell me a single thing that happened in it, no matter how much you enjoyed it.

“Jurassic World Rebirth” crashes into theaters on July 2.