Well at first, I didn’t pay any attention to a little movie called ‘Jungle Cruise’, but when Disney announced a lot of its unreleased movies would be coming to Disney+ amidst the COVID hiatus, and Jungle Cruise wasn’t one of them, I was like, ‘oh snap, Disney actually believes in this thing.’ It was then that I looked at the trailer, and came to the estimation that Disney is hoping to have another Pirates-of-the-Caribbean-style juggernaut on their hands. The signs are clear – this movie is a perilous action adventure; Pirates of the Caribbean was a perilous action adventure. This movie is based off a Disneyland Park ride; Pirates of the Caribbean was based off a Disneyland Park ride. Disney likes money, and big long franchises get you money – it’s all pretty obvious when you think about it. And if Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Emily Blunt can capture even a sample of the sizzle Johnny Depp and Keira Knightly managed on the high seas, then Disney will be once again counting that bountiful gold. I never saw Pirates of the Caribbean at the cinema when it first came out, so I’d like to put myself in on the ground floor for this one. Maui meets Mary Poppins; over to you.
Jungle Cruise is directed by Jaume Collet-Serra – try as he might, MacGregor (Jack Whitehall) can’t convince the British Royal Society to give his sister, botanist Dr. Lily Haughton (Emily Blunt), a look at a mysterious arrowhead that she believes will lead to The Tree of Life; a legend of the Amazon that provides a great healing power that could revolutionise medicine if true. Dr. Haughton looks ahead to an upcoming adventure with gusto, and getting her hands on the arrowhead one way or another, leads her to Brazil to begin her exploration. Among the jungle cruisers is Captain Frank Wolff (Dwayne Johnson), who may have the most dilapidated boat in the harbour, and a propensity for Dad-jokes, but that doesn’t stop him from easing Lily into thinking that he would be the best river captain for the job. His knowledge of the Amazonian waterways is impeccable, and with his own invested agenda in the arrowhead, the search begins, where challenges lie ahead, and dangers lurk on their tail.
Dwayne Johnson doesn’t embrace the same capacity for scoundrel like Johnny Depp, but that’s a tall order, isn’t it – ‘be as great as one of the best movie characters of all time’, in Jack Sparrow. Naw, but it’s alright; Johnson may still be the best fit for this movie – as one of the most likable actors in movies of the modern-day, he’s undeniable. Johnson’s Frank is pretty straitlaced and cheeky, helping him get away with copious amounts of fibbing and deceitfulness. I also reckon if you hadn’t seen another movie in the last ten years, you could watch Jungle Cruise and think, ‘damn, wouldn’t that Emily Blunt be perfect to play Mary Poppins?’ I did, and it’s a shame that her outing in Mary Poppins Returns was such a lukewarm affair, where here in Jungle Cruise, Emily Blunt is easily given the boldest character, and has worked herself into it skilfully to fulfil a very engaging protagonist. She’s the sort’ve swashbuckling heroine that I can get around! Harping back to Pirates of the Caribbean (continually through this review), I always admired how that movie is seamless in challenging the feminine perspective in pirate mythology, through Elizabeth Swann’s desire to adventure, and whilst Jungle Cruise is a little curter in moments when it wants to wag its finger at the stuffy male-driven fields of the past, Jungle Cruise also provides that natural setting to reflect insufficient equality between genders, and excel beyond them. Most of the other characters are distracted by Lily wearing pants, and she ‘couldn’t care in the slightest’; I love it. At the other end, it’s Jack Whitehall as MacGregor who is the one preoccupied by worldly possessions, and doing his best C-3PO impression as the high-minded nervous-nelly of the expedition, rounds out this cruising trio quite nicely.
I guess I got what I expected from the movie, but there’s always room to hope for a little more. Jungle Cruise isn’t going to revolutionise the world (who knew?), but it’s bright and colourful, and more often entertaining across its runtime than in times where it’s not. I found some pacing issues; Jungle Cruise could be a little more concise, and some of the action’s editing is strange where it’ll pair two tone-conflicting occurrences at the same time, so you can’t fully fall into one scenario over the other – the best example I can remember is while Frank and McGregor are debating about luggage, which is amusing, Lily is being abducted, which is startling. The fourth hero of our story, Trader Sam (Veronica Falcon) (or fifth, if you want to include Proxima the leopard, and we probably should) disappears and returns just as quickly a couple times, which is jarring, and I think the movie could have used her more affectionately in the story. I could also argue that the two sets of villains (not include Paul Giamatti’s big boat boss-man this time) undercut each other at times, but I’m probably nit-picking – these adversaries aren’t anything special, and I doubt they’ll will be memorable for years to come; they serve their purpose as obstacles along the way to the Tree of Life, where the imprisoned men of the river seriously retread the cursed pirates of the Black Pearl, and aren’t nearly as interesting. Yet I think Jesse Plemons as Prince Joachim had the potential to be more; there’s one small attention to detail early that I really loved, and gave me hope that all these characters would be handled with care – that is, when Prince Joachim first encounters Dr. Haughton and smiles at her brashness and ingenuity, as she rambles about Zulu tribes whilst trying to escape the Royal Society with the arrowhead. I thought this might set up a vile or indulgent personal love/hate relationship between adversaries that never came to be. There’s always something extra when the bad guy shares admiration or even a crush on the hero; ask Frollo and Esmerelda about that (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), but I guess giving the Nazi general some added shading is asking too much when having a Nazi in a Disney kid’s movie today may already be nudging the line.
As for Jungle Cruise in summary, ‘Skippy’ and ‘Pants’ surely make for an exciting pair, who really outshine the Amazon and river adventure for me; which is a positive and a negative at the same time. There may be room for expansion if the numbers are good, but I don’t think we can accept a sequel unless it’s some sort of epic showdown between where we are now, and where it all began – Dwayne Johnson’s ‘Steamboat Rockie’ verses Disney’s own Mickey Mouse ‘Steamboat Willie’.
3.5
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