Jurassic Park Rebirth does pretty much what fans of the franchise expect, and seem to want: Director Gareth Edwards (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, The Creator) and original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp (Presence) gather up a bunch of characters with varying motivations and throw them into a wilderness setting where they risk getting eaten by dinosaurs. Some die, some survive, but before the final tally is taken, the humans spend a lot of time running, screaming, and looking panicked. All except covert ops agent Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), who smirks and shrugs her way through a lot of the action — an acting choice that’s drawn a lot of sneering criticism about her “extreme for-the-paycheck energy.”

Or as one critic put it, “[Johansson]’s many attempts to appear as if her character is thinking about some devilishly clever plan onscreen only suggest the actress’s fraught mental calculations regarding how much this gig might pay for, say, her home renovations.”

It’s true that Johansson plays Zora without a lot of the range or nuance she’s brought to movies like Under the Skin, Lost in Translation, or Vicky Cristina Barcelona. When Zora first meets pharma bro Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), who kicks off the plot by hiring her to run point on his illegal, dangerous trip to dinosaur-occupied equatorial regions, she plays the entire encounter with the patient tolerance of a cool aunt humoring a cosseted young nibling who’s just learned how to tell knock-knock jokes. Her half-amused smirk barely flickers when Martin offers her $10 million for the mission.

When she helps him recruit paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) and her old partner-in-combat Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), she maintains the same Mona Lisa semi-smile the whole time. Even when Zora and Duncan run a pre-arranged gambit to force Martin to double their fee, she never once bothers to pretend she believes Duncan’s doubts and demurrals about the gig are true. Her entire attitude is “You know we’re scamming you. We know that you know. And it doesn’t matter, because we know you need us and you have infinite funds. You’re going to pay our price, so why should we bother putting actual effort into this con we’re running on you?”

Johansson’s choices for Zora as a character haven’t landed well with a lot of viewers, who’ve said........

© Polygon