On a basic, structural story/character/plot level, yes.
I don't doubt that people are enjoying the spectacle and I'm not going to claim your dad's opinion is invalid. It's not. How he feels is how he feels, and I'm happy he enjoyed the movie. But - as objective as one can be about film - no, it is in no way better than JP, unless your expectations/bar is set so low that literally just the sight of a CGI dinosaur pleases you (and that's not too far off from describing why some people enjoy the movie).
Plain and simple, there's no internal logic or consistency to the film or how the characters behave... which is a fairly basic element of story-telling. A story can be about anything - it can be about two idiots trying to deliver a briefcase full of cash to a woman that one of those idiots has a crush on - but, it needs to be make sense unto itself. Character motivations and arcs, no matter the subject, should come from a place that's logical given the rules/perimeters of the story, even if the story is unreal (like... destroying a magic ring).
That's an argument people make: "it's a movie about <insert fictional thing>, it doesn't have to make sense!" Of course it does, internally. Yet, almost every character in JW is a moron, and not in the sense of relatable people making human mistakes, but in the sense that they all - save for the assistant - deserve to be eaten, regurgitated, re-eaten and pooped out for how goddamn dumb they are. Their various ticks and traits don't pay off in any meaningful way; threads get introduced and dumped for no reason besides shoddy scripting/editing, etc.
But, there's CGI dinosaurs and gyro-spheres and folks getting their limbs ripped off, so, whatcha gonna do?
