Jungle Cruise (2021) Disney/Action-Adventure RT: 127 minutes Rated PG-13 (sequences of adventure violence) Director: Jaume Collet-Serra Screenplay: Michael Green, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa Music: James Newton Howard Cinematography: Flavio Labiano Release date: July 30, 2021 (US) Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Edgar Ramirez, Jack Whitehall, Jesse Plemons, Paul Giamatti, Veronica Falcon, Dani Rovira, Quim Gutierrez, Dan Dargan Carter, Andy Nyman, Raphael Alejandro, Simone Lockhart, Pedro Lopez. Box Office: $117M (US)/$221M (World)
Rating: * ½
I swear I wanted to like Disney’s Jungle Cruise or as I like to call it, Pirates of the Amazon. It’s the studio’s latest attempt to turn one of their theme park attractions into a blockbuster movie a la Pirates of the Caribbean. I was in the mood for a cool jungle adventure movie. I hoped beyond hope it would be fun. Instead, it proves that POTC was a one-off. It’s the only one that’s any good. The others- The Haunted Mansion, The Country Bears, Tomorrowland and Mission to Mars- stink. You can add Jungle Cruise to the list of failures.
To call Jungle Cruise derivative would be a vast understatement. Indiana Jones himself would be at a loss to unearth a single original idea in the movie’s protracted 127 minutes. It’s a mix of a lot of better movies including Raiders of the Lost Ark, The African Queen, Avatar, Tomb Raider (the reboot), Jumanji (the newer ones), The Mummy (the 1999 one) and probably a dozen other movies. Put them all together, cover it in desperation and you have Jungle Cruise. Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra (The Shallows), it misses the mark by a mile and a half. Tonally, it’s way off. Movies like this should have a playful tone. After all, they’re designed for audiences looking for escapist summertime entertainment. Jungle Cruise feels like it’s forcing itself on us, have fun or else. How can anybody enjoy a movie under such conditions?
The plot has the plucky heroine, botanist Dr. Lily Houghton (Blunt, A Quiet Place I & II), searching for the “Tears of the Moon”, a mythical tree whose red petals are said to have healing powers. Just one petal could help cure cancer and all other incurable diseases. To find the tree, she will need a priceless arrowhead that’s currently in the possession of the Royal Society and they’re not about to hand it over to a woman chasing a myth. She helps herself to it instead and heads off to South America with her fussy, spoiled brother MacGregor (Whitehall, Bad Education) in tow.
They need to hire a boat to take them down the Amazon. Naturally, they hire a goofball with a rickety old boat. Frank “Skipper” Wolff (Johnson, late of the Fast & Furious movies) ekes out a living taking tourists down the Amazon on bogus adventures. After some negotiation and a lot of ado involving a jaguar and the sleazy harbormaster (Giamatti, San Andreas), the threesome heads off on their quest. They’re not the only ones interested in finding the tree. German baddie Prince Joachim (Plemons, Game Night) wants to find the tree to help his country win WWI or some such foolishness. He chases after the heroes in a submarine. How he manages to sneak it in unnoticed is anybody’s guess.
The plot, in and of itself, isn’t terrible. It’s no better or worse than any jungle adventure through the ages starting with the Tarzan movies of the 30s and 40s. I have no problem with tall tales involving magical McGuffins, reanimated 16th century explorers, cannibalistic tribes and more snakes than you can shake a stick at. My only beef with the plot is this really asinine development that I won’t even dignify with a reveal. I’ll only say it’s stupid and involves Frank. Also, the army of bees is just ludicrous. BTW, I’m all for inclusiveness, but was it really necessary to make one of the main characters gay? It adds nothing at all to the story. It just feels like Disney is checking off a box.
The problem with Jungle Cruise, and it’s a BIG one, is the CGI. There’s too much of it. It consistently overwhelms the action. Practically everything, even the jungle surroundings, is CGI-rendered. It’s bad CGI on top of everything else. I’ve seen more convincing graphics in video games. The jaguar, who turns out to be a friendly one, looks too fake to be believed. The terrible effects took me completely out of the picture. This is incontrovertible proof of the superiority of practical FX. The original Raiders of the Lost Ark is 1000 times more convincing and it’s over 40 years old.
So what about the two leads, Johnson and Blunt? Let me put it this way. As a match-up, they fall somewhere in the middle, far below Bogie and Hepburn (The African Queen) and Ford and Allen (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and just a smidge above Penn and Madonna (Shanghai Surprise) and Chamberlain and Stone (King Solomon’s Mines). They have some amusing banter, but you could hardly describe their chemistry as magic. To be fair, Blunt makes an engaging heroine. Johnson, on the other hand, is completely miscast. His lousy performance in Jungle Cruise isn’t due to lack of talent, but rather not finding a consistent tone for his character. He fluctuates between a gruff, hard-drinking grouch and a goofball scoundrel with a litany of bad jokes. Plemons camps it up as a textbook German villain complete with Kaiser-type uniform and exaggerated accent. All that’s missing is the monocle.
As for pacing, Jungle Cruise moves like a bull in a china shop. It lumbers around noisily destroying everything in its path. In the process, it sucks the life right out of the theater or the living room depending on where you watch it. It’s also available for streaming on Disney+. It doesn’t really matter where you watch it; the end result is still the same. It’s a shipwreck of an action-adventure that only goes to show theme park rides should remain just that. POTC was a fluke, Disney! Lightning doesn’t necessarily strike in the same place twice.
