In cinemas now and available on Disney+ Premium
Pfft. You know how you can really like someone and want them to do well, and usually they’re so reliable, you never have to doubt them – and then they do something really dumb? No? Okay, just me then… Awks.
Normally for me, though, the Rock – aka Dwayne Johnson – is one of those people. He can sing in Moana, he can star in a terrible Fast and Furious spin-off, he can act with a giant CGI gorilla and I’ll not flutter an eye lash. No matter what movie he’s in, no matter how dumb it looks, it usually turns out to be somewhere between “better than I thought it was going to be” and “totes awesome!”
And Emily Blunt is one of those people, too. True, she was almost Black Widow in the Marvel movies before a scheduling conflict meant Scarlett Johansson had to step into the breach at the last minute to take her place – I am just not ready to imagine a world where that never happened, but I can forgive Blunt for something she never actually did. Isn’t that nice of me?
But apart from that near-slip from her, I’ve been able to rely solidly on Blunt’s presence in a movie since more or less The Devil Wears Prada (2006) to know it’s going to be in the above-mentioned quality bracket.
And now we have Jungle Cruise, in which would-be explorer-cum-scientist-cum-sufragette Blunt decides to head to South America in 1916 with her closeted brother (Jack Whitehall) in order to find a slightly magical flower that could cure all known diseases, if you can believe all the old parchments, maps and wives’ tales that she’s collected. There they meet Johnson – and his rival (Paul Giamatti) – and charter him and his tourist-attraction vessel to take them down the Amazon to find the flower.
There’s a couple of obstacles for them. Naturally, there’s headhunters and cannibals. There’s also the zombie-like conquistadors who first found the flower, led by Edgar Ramírez (American Crime Story). There’s also a relative of the German Kaiser (Jess Plemons) who wants to get the flower for himself and is in hot pursuit of Blunt in a surprisingly modern submarine, aided in his quest by some helpful bees.
Yes, bees.
That’s where they lost me. Pfft.
Fair’s fair
It’s no mean feat to try to turn a fairground attraction into a movie – yes, Jungle Cruise is based on the Disneyland attraction Jungle Cruise. To the credit of writers Michael Green, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, they’ve not done a bad job. This is very much a family movie and – stop me if you saw this one coming – and a roller-coaster of a ride at that.
Sorry. I’ll fetch my stole.
True, what they’ve done is largely taken The Mummy (1999), relocated it to South America, made Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz’s characters sassier, made John Hannah’s character explicitly rather than implicitly gay, and added in just a touch of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982) and National Treasure (2004).
And then they made it dumber. Just a bit, but it is noticeably stupider than The Mummy was. That’s the bit that’s disappointing – usually, the dumbness in a Dwayne Johnson movie is a knowing dumbness, with a wink to the audience. Here, it’s just dumbness.
Sunk cost effect
Otherwise, what we have is a whole lot of spectacle, CGI and running around papering over the cracks and implausibilities in a script that the cast and director’s best efforts can’t overcome. I can forgive a movie that’s dumb and fun but knows it; I can’t forgive one that’s dumb, isn’t that fun and, worst of all, thinks it’s smart.
That spectacle, running around and CGI are also surprisingly dull. True, I watched it on Disney+, rather than at a cinema, which is really where it needs to be seen to get that real fairground ride feel. But the first 20 or so minutes until Blunt and Johnson meet are fairly languorous, and Johnson’s early antics on the river without Blunt merely made me think he needed a Trading Standards investigation, rather than our knowing winks at his charming roguish ways as he hoodwinks rich tourists.
After that, the stunts kick in but there’s no real threat of peril to either Blunt or Johnson. I actually feared more for Whitehall, who at least was trying his best; to the writers’ credit, he also had more gumption than Hannah did in The Mummy and even a somewhat poignant reason for his devotion to his sister.
Plemons, meanwhile, is pretty laughable. Bereft of the more familiar Nazi iconography that German baddies invariably get and with no time to debate the Kaiser’s imperialist plans for expansion, all we have is Plemons’ oddness and shiny uniform to denote his evil. He’s the antagonist, he shoots people, he has an evil plan. He must therefore be evil. Unfortunately, we’re never actually frightened of him.
It’s therefore a shame that Ramírez’s far superior, far more frightening villain is given only a fraction of Plemons’ screen time. And while he does get a back story, his character’s modern-day motivations are so thin, they’ve probably been following Drew Barrymore’s latest diet.
Jungle over-booked
I paid an astronomical £19 to watch to Jungle Cruise, so I’m going to go out of my way to look for more positives in it now. Top of the list are, of course, Johnson and Blunt, who are absolutely as appealing and capable as always. I’ve never been a fan of Whitehall as a comedian and I’ve never seen his forays into acting on TV, but he did a very good job here. I’m tempted to watch more things featuring Ramírez, too.
I also appreciated the script’s wokeness. Again, its efforts to show Blunt’s emancipated nature feel like a dumbed down version of a better movie – Wonder Woman (2017), in this case. Similarly, the attempts to set up witty bantz by having Johnson call her ‘Pants’ every five minutes because she wears trousers and she’s a woman are not so much heavy-handed as lead-weight-handed, not to mention as historically unnuanced as the rest of the movie.
But together with Whitehall’s storyline, the script provides a decent, family-friendly attempt at the same deimperialisation the theme park ride is going through itself. Indeed, it’s Imperial Spain, Imperial Germany and colonisation that are the movie’s real villains, rather than Plemons and Ramírez per se.
There is a twist, too. It’s a really good twist that I didn’t see coming and immediately made the movie far more interesting and almost existential, even if ultimately its conclusion is that the Rock would look good in a pink hat. He does. I do not disagree with that conclusion. If you do watch Jungle Cruise, savour the moment when that twist shows up because it’s almost worth the price of entry. Well, maybe 50% of it, on Disney+ at least.
But honestly, this is a movie that needs to be seen in a cinema and if you can’t see it in a cinema, you shouldn’t watch it, certainly not until it’s a lot cheaper on streaming. There are much much worse movies featuring Johnson but in some ways, this is the most disappointing, since rather than going in expecting rubbish and getting something much better, I went in expecting something not bad and got something a bit meh instead.
Rating
If you watch it at home
If you watch it at the cinema
