‘No-one’s dumb enough to go where we’re going,’ quips Mahershala Ali in the latest instalment of the Jurassic Park series. But, let’s be honest, in the 32 years since the first film wowed us with its photorealistic dinos, they don’t seem to have had any trouble keeping the suckers coming. There’s still running, there’s still screaming, the lesser-known cast members are still gonna get eaten. And yet every now and then it all works really well.

Helmed by a master of this kind of movie, Gareth Edwards (Monsters, Godzilla), once you get past the truly nonsensical set-up, Jurassic World Rebirth is arguably the best instalment since the 1993 original, and certainly since 2015’s rebrand, Jurassic World. Scarlett Johansson plays mercenary Zora, hired by slippery pharmaceutical rep Martin (Rupert Friend) to extract the DNA of the three largest dinosaurs now residing in a remote tropical locale, as part of a crazy plan to cure heart disease.

Zora brings Ali’s kind-hearted boat captain and Ed Skrein’s gung-ho muscle Bobby into the fold, while Jonathan Bailey is the endearing, easy-on-the-eye palaeontologist Dr Henry Loomis, with whom our heroine shares a bit of a thing, plus there’s a floating family led by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, who are in need of rescue. Interestingly, the Jaws and Alien sagas provide as much inspiration as this film’s own predecessors, cue a rollocking, high-seas pursuit and a fearsome, Xenomorph-resembling ‘big bad’.

Marking a shift away from the fun but overstuffed Dominion, with its fairly straightforward hunt-those-dinosaurs-down narrative Rebirth takes things back to basics, delivering exciting action, superior beasts, frights that are as full-throttle as a 12A rating will allow, and a perfectly picked cast. Although it presents an entirely new, and likeable, ensemble, the film can feel a bit stuck in nostalgia mode, hitting a number of overly familiar story beats. But Edwards directs with such flair for the spectacle, humour and set pieces, that the result is a robustly entertaining, suitably roarsome ride.

Jurassic World Rebirth is in cinemas now.