Look, it’s a Jurassic Park movie. If you go to see it, that’s on you. Crazy to have critics watch Jurassic World Rebirth and then gripe ferociously about it in long ranting reviews. This is the seventh film in the franchise, and we ought to know the drill by now.

The only thing required of these movies is that they provide a steady stream of dinosaur attacks on humans. When an attack isn’t happening, there’s a brief plot setup for the next attack. That’s the deal.

And since obviously, I’m Team Dinosaur, I tend to enjoy these sequels once I’m in the theater. I don’t avidly seek out such entertainments as Jurassic World Rebirth, but I do find that once I’m reminded of the compact we audiences have made with this franchise, I get on board again.

They’re always about how stupid, corrupt people bring dinosaurs to life again just to taunt and terrorize them in the name of theme-park amusement and/or scientific R&D. This isn’t even a far-fetched plot, since there are imminent threats to resurrect the extinct woolly mammoth. What will they do with the woolly mammoth if they ever succeed in lab-creating one? Taunt and torment the poor creature for theme-park amusement and/or scientific R&D. I hope the woolly mammoth kills every one of those fuckers.

Lest you doubt that this is the correct response built into the way these movies work, I’ll simply note that Jurassic World Rebirth features in the first sequence a dying brontosaurus that’s causing a downtown traffic jam by expiring in front of a hostile public. A character stuck in traffic says something representing the general mood of cruel indifference, like, “Just die already and get out of the way.”

If you recall from your childhood, when you were still emotionally healthy and loved dinosaurs with a passion, the brontosaurus is the sweetest dinosaur: an immense long-necked herbivore of majestic dimensions that has no violence in it and just wants to stand there eating greenery in peace. If you’re indifferent to the abject death of the brontosaurus in full view, you’re scum.

Screenwriter David Koepp took time out from his prolific writing in collaboration with Steven Soderbergh (Black Bag, Presence, Kimi) to concoct the script for Jurassic World Rebirth. It’s his return to the franchise — Koepp cowrote the original 1993 film alongside Jurassic Park novelist Michael Crichton. Director Gareth Edwards (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Godzilla) claims to be a huge fan of the original blockbuster and made this movie knowing he’d be seeking out Steven Spielberg’s approval at every turn.

Yet the overall critical reaction to this film is sour dismissal. CGI dinosaurs are no longer awesome, they say, echoing the point the franchise itself makes over and over in its plotlines — that modern people are so easily bored even resurrected dinosaurs won’t divert them for long. But critical rejection hardly matters to the public, which is turning out in record numbers for Rebirth. It’s summer, see, and things are not going well in the world. Therefore, people want to watch dinosaurs eat humans. It follows logically.

In Jurassic World Rebirth, Koepp has efficiently sketched in the basics you need to get the dinosaur action going. There’s the familiar narrative gambit of international team-building to start. Scarlett Johansson plays the tough but traumatized American “covert operations expert” aka mercenary Zora Bennett, who gets recruited by a money-grubbing corporate creep, British pharmaceutical rep Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), to retrieve sample DNA from living dinosaurs. The DNA will be the basis for curing heart disease in humans. It has something to do with the dinosaurs’ extra-large hearts. Okay, so maybe Koepp is leaning into the theme of Dinosaurs Good, Humans Bad a bit excessively.

To further demonstrate this, Zora and Martin will get hugely, heartlessly rich as a result of this mission, because of course the idea is to get corporate ownership of the curative DNA and develop it for profit. Only the rich will be able to afford treatment for heart disease it seems.

There’s some added difficulty in extracting the DNA, however. Because the resurrected dinosaurs have proved too deadly for parks (people apparently got bored with them anyway) with the rest dying off due to cruel neglect and environmental insufficiencies, those remaining are quarantined on a few remote islands along the equator. This means a long journey picking up further team members like nerdy paleontologist Dr Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), West Indian boat-owning badass Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), his humorous pilot LeClerc (Bechir Sylvain), his fetching French crewwoman Nina (Philippine Velge), and his musclebound Australian weapons guy (Ed Skrein), who brings the kill-crazy firepower.

There’s a rather awkward segue to a separate set of characters on a pleasure cruise that comes to a bad end when an aquatic dinosaur attacks their sailboat. This Mexican family, the Delgados — made up of father (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), small daughter (Audrina Miranda), teenage daughter (Luna Blaise), plus her comically lackadaisical boyfriend (David Iacono) — gets rescued by Zora’s team. The family provides additional characters who will be in constant danger of becoming dinosaur chow.

You can generally tell who’s going to be killed in Jurassic World Rebirth, and even in what order, if you’ve seen enough action-adventure films. Testing your skill at guessing who’s next can be an added source of entertainment.

Koepp threw in a tripartite guide to the action in the middle, in the vicinity of Dinosaur Island, with the plot device of three DNA samples having to be obtained from three different types of living dinosaurs — one each from sea, land, and air creatures. It’s a handy gimmick so you can pace yourself through the various narrative stages and measure out your popcorn or candy consumption as you go.

And at the end, there’s climactic action sequence involving the survivors’ attempts to escape the island using air, land, and sea vehicles. It repeats the larger structure and creates a nice pattern — not really necessary, but a little finesse is always welcome. Koepp’s a trained professional, see, and that’s why they pay him the big bucks.

There’s no living humanity left on the island — just the abandoned laboratories where scientific experiments were once conducted. The dinosaurs themselves are mostly angry mutants, too ugly to be good for display in the old theme parks, too deadly to allow for further R&D. The humans in this sequel are now interlopers in the world of dinosaurs instead of the other way around. In fact, what we’ve got here is the Island of Misfit Dinosaurs. It ratchets up even further the sense that humans have done enough damage to these creatures, so for Gods’ sake, can’t you just leave them alone?

Dr Loomis is there to exude a sense of old-time humanist decency and say, “It’s a sin to kill a dinosaur.” (Yes, that references the famous quote from To Kill a Mockingbird.) But even he can’t help intruding himself into the lives of the island dinosaurs, most egregiously spying on a love scene between brontosauri, which have mutated in an unusually pretty way with frilly neck crests and elongated tails that wave around in mesmerizing coils. At this inopportune time of foreplay, he goes up and puts his silly hand familiarly on one of the brontosaurus’ legs, while Zora shoots a needle into its neck to gather DNA. Can’t a dinosaur get a little privacy?

Product placement is laughably in your face throughout the movie — a Snickers candy bar wrapper kicks off the first action scene involving the inevitably escaping dinosaur that leads to the abandonment of the laboratories on the island. Then Altoids, the curiously strong mint, provide one of the main character traits of geeky nice-guy scientist Dr Loomis, who’s always chewing them with loud crunching noises. That’s not the best habit on Dinosaur Island where you’re being constantly stalked by enormous meat-eating predators with keen hearing. Though on the other hand, the entire cast of characters yammers relentlessly on the island, at a time when you’d think they’d be as silent as all the A Quiet Place movies combined.

But how are you going to get people to reveal their emotionally troubled backstories to each other so they can bond, if they can’t yak it up? It’s a real script problem.

Anyway, if you’re at all movie-savvy, you already know if you want to see Jurassic World Rebirth or not and you aren’t likely to be surprised by the experience if you do go. In this you differ sharply from the majority of film critics, who are always shocked — shocked! — to find the usual cinematic suspects doing the usual things in the usual ways for the usual reasons.