Given how successful the Jurassic Park / Jurassic World franchise has been at the box office, it’s no surprise that Universal Pictures will find any excuse to keep the gravy train rolling. So here comes Jurassic World Rebirth, a film with all new characters that only has a tangential relationship to the stories that have come before.

And, man, does it have a lot of characters. Leading the way is Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johannson), a woman who is known for being able to procure hard-to-get things. She’s hired by Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), who works for a medical company looking to get blood samples from giant dinosaurs to make a life-saving heart medicine. Naturally, they need a dinosaur expert, which they find in Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), whose work at a natural history museum is coming to an end as the public seems to be growing tired of dinosaurs, five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion.

The dinosaurs they need can be found off the coast of Suriname, a subtropical environment that is one of the only hospitable areas left for the creatures. There Zora recruits boat captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), who comes with a crew of three mostly anonymous people. And for good measure, Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) happens to be sailing nearby in the middle of an ocean voyage with his two daughters and his older daughter’s extremely lazy boyfriend.

Given the recent pedigree of director Gareth Edwards (The Creator, Rogue One) and original Jurassic Park writer David Koepp (returning to the franchise for the first time since 1997’s The Lost World), the film should be an unmitigated success. Instead, the filmmakers and their team stumble blindly through any kind of character development. The fact that they’re trying to introduce no fewer than 11 different people should be a big flashing red light, but still they persist.

Instead of making us care whether the people in the film live or die (spoiler alert: A lot of them die), Edwards and Koepp seem to lay all of their hopes on audiences being satisfied with yet-more dino mayhem. But dinosaurs rampaging or chomping people in half only works if the human component is compelling, which it is not. They try to gloss over this by having the characters encounter experimental cross-bred creatures, a story device that makes an impact with a monstrous one in the final act, but otherwise fails to land.

The film also yada-yadas a lot of the plot points, including how Krebs’ company knows they need the blood of these particular dinosaurs when they’ve never had it before. They reference events from previous films in oblique ways, but they run into the same issue every Jurassic World film has had: Not being able to properly explain the main premise of their story, given that previous events should have stopped them from ever happening.

Any film with an Oscar winner (Ali) and nominee (Johannson) at the top should be one worth watching, but it almost feels like neither actor knew what kind of film they were actually making. They each get by on charm, but even they can’t sell the nonsense they’re asked to say. Bailey, who played Fiyero in Wicked, is given a weird nothing part, while Friend plays the villain with little verve. We hardly get to know anyone else, but Audrina Miranda, who plays the youngest daughter on the sailboat, is super-cute and gets a couple of decent emotional moments.

As with the Marvel movies, there is bound to come a time when the general moviegoing public gets tired of being served mediocre Jurassic movies. If any of the franchise’s movies deserves to be the stopping point, it’s this one, with a non-starter of a story and little to get excited about when it comes to the dinosaurs.

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Jurassic World Rebirth opens in theaters on July 2.