Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Jungle Cruise — now available for Disney+ subscribers to stream after a stint on Disney+’s Premier Access tier — is I guess what passes for original content from Disney these days. Those of us who’ve ever waited in line for 70 minutes to pay $18 for a terrible cheeseburger while in the vicinity of a minimum-wage employee in a brain-broilingly hot Mickey Mouse costume know the movie’s based on a Disney theme park ride that was/maybe still is rife with questionable cultural stereotypes. The film is not the usual Mouse House sequel, franchise piece or regurgitation of an old property, so hooray I guess? The draw here may be the cast, led by Disney-flick vets Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Emily “Poppins Redux” Blunt, the former of whom does his usual Rockin’ stuff while the latter of them does an interesting Indiana Jane Goodall thing. Sounds like a mess, but maybe it’ll work anyway.
JUNGLE CRUISE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: It begins like no Disney movie ever before it, with heavy metal and what must absolutely be a Werner Herzog reference: We hear a Metallica song — OK, it’s the wimpiest one they ever wrote — then witness the legend of Aguirre (Edgar Ramirez), who we all know is the Wrath of God. He also quested for a long-lost legend of the thing and the whatsits, deep in the Amazon jungle, and that very whatever is what Lily Houghton (Emily Blunt) wants to find. It’s London, 1916, and Lily is part of British society, where a WOMAN wearing TROUSERS is SCANDALOUS. She cannot convince the bejowled and harrumphing white men of the sciences to allow such a blatantly pantsed woman access to an artifact retrieved from the heart of Brazil, the very thing that could lead her to the place where a special flower exists that could have great healing properties, if you believe in ancient legends, and in the context of goliath Disney extravaganzas, why wouldn’t you?
So she steals the thing, which is quite the rigamarole of crazy ladder action and flustered men with mustaches, and jets to Brazil with her brother MacGregor (Jack Whitehall). This doesn’t make German scheissekopf Prince Joachim (Jesse Plemons) happy, because he wanted the thing to get the thing, and so he dons his epaulettes and schleps his submarine to South America in pursuit. I’m not sure the Joachim diddledy-floo is all that necessary, but the movie wouldn’t feature the signature Disney Bloat without it. Anyhoo, it’s about time we get to the Rock — he plays Capt. Frank, who has a hunk-of-junk steamship he uses to lead tourists on cheap ‘n’ cheesy Amazon River tours that look a lot like a certain ride in a certain theme park. He tells the dumbest jokes and sets up all manner of phony drama to thrill his easily duped passengers. Then we get the title card, 15 minutes into the movie, which is some real Once Upon a Time in the West shit if I ever saw it.
There’s another rigamarole — somehow involving Paul Giamatti and a CGI leopard — leading to Lily’s hiring Frank to lead them on the excursion to the thing where she can use the thing to get the thing, and I was down on my knees praying that it would involve dragging the steamship over a mountain (no spoilers tho!). MacGregor is incredibly supportive of his sister despite the fact that he’d rather be indoors in a smoking jacket with a brandy snifter or whatever, and really isn’t cut out for anything involving sweating. He lugs a dozen trunks of stuff with him so Frank can toss all his unnecessary luxuries into the drink. MacGregor apparently does all this because he’s gay, I guess? But the word “gay” isn’t in the script, and neither does he say something along the lines of “I prefer men”; there’s just some softshoeing around it which the writers would say is likely how people would address it in 1916. But let’s get back on the river here: Frank also can’t believe a WOMAN would wear TROUSERS, so he calls Lily “Pants.” Frank wants to be called “Skipper,” so Lily calls him “Skippy.” Their playfully contentious dynamic established, these two (and MacGregor) will head downriver to have jungle adventures that involve proto-Nazis, snakes and bees, wild rapids and other such treacherousnesses, which all adds up to 10 pounds of CGI shit in a five-pound bag.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Pirates of the Caribbean, Aguirre the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, Romancing the Stone, Raiders of the Lost Ark and somehow not quite but almost Apocalypse Now.
Performance Worth Watching: So how does Indiana Jane feel about snakes? Mostly indifferent, it seems. Blunt, as she is in so many of her films, is the alchemical presence here that makes cornball banter and gee-whiz slapsticky action go down easy. (Maybe she’s like a spoonful of… you know.) She stubbornly refuses to indulge feminist cliches, just surely and assertively being the kickass-funny woman that she is.
Memorable Dialogue: MacGregor gets all the best lines, especially this one addressing his sister’s malfeasances: “Breaking and entering, grand larceny and worst of all, forced to take public transport.”
Sex and Skin: None. Sex does not exist in Disney-contrived realities.
Our Take: Jungle Cruise adheres tightly to the sort-of-mostly-live-action Disney template: Convoluted action set pieces, medium-stakes brouhahas, wide-eyed characters reciting remedially amusing written-by-committee dialogue, gloss, scads of CGI, more gloss, a have-fun-or-else tonal aesthetic, and even more gloss. Its primary mechanisms include monsters, ancient mysteries and their related artifacts, speechifying cartoon villains, hostile headhunter natives (an offensive stereotype that thankfully works to acquit itself), plot switcheroos and a soggy-bread romance that Blunt and Johnson just can’t make into French toast no matter how hard they try. Frankly, they shouldn’t even be thinking about smooching, since they’re quite busy enough running and clambering and scampering, getting in and out of hair-of-their-pants scrapes and exchanging mildly barbed pseudo-witticisms, ever in danger of being snatched by malevolent FX.
The film is long and unwieldy at more than two hours, but we expected that. Again, the Nazi subplot feels wedged in, and could easily be excised with a putty knife — but I’m also conflicted, because Plemons is a terrific snooty fascist, pronouncing “jungle” as “jung-el-ah” with a megasyllabic Teutonic flourish that makes you laugh at how much you loathe him for firing torpedoes at Emily Blunt. One must also take note of the oh-no GAY WOKENESS, won’t someone think of the children, I mean, they might think gay people are perfectly all right or something, although this film plays a little too loosely with the fastidious stereotype, which is employed as butt-of-the-joke comic-relief fodder, so it’s ultimately a mixed bag. Also jammed in is an overly lengthy late-second-act flashback detailing Frank’s sad backstory, which delays the inevitable noisy third-act climacto-extravaganza of light mayhem, where the heroes fight mightily to not be swallowed by an avalanche of heavily artificial and moderately entertaining visual bullshit.
So Jungle Cruise is lumpy and inconsistent in pace, just like many other heavily calculated, very expensive Disney junk-art products that one is somewhat loathe to admit that one somewhat enjoyed. It’s easy to appreciate Blunt’s good-natured, effortlessly funny performance (even with a flimsy barely-there character), working in concert with Johnson’s usual amiable arched-eyebrow winking heroism, their acceptable, if unexceptional chemistry rendering the film mostly functional. The movie’s a neo-modern throwback that attempts to recycle the old-fashioned adventure silliness that Pirates of the Caribbean recycled via high-tech 21st-century visual-overloadism. What’s old is new and what’s new is old — again.
Our Call: One sits on the fence as one says that Jungle Cruise is recommendable, sans modifiers signifying goodness or badness. STREAM IT once and destroy, I guess?
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.
