Jungle Cruise
Directed by: Jaume Collet-Serra
Runtime: 127 minutes
The question I’ve started asking myself every time I see a new Disney movie trailer, advertisement, or sign written in the stars is always this: do I want to see it in the cinemas, pay for it on Disney+, or wait for it to show up on my ‘Recently Added’ movie list? Because as cinema finds a new way in a post-pandemic (sort of) world, our options for viewing new releases have expanded beyond the cinema and are changing the way we view new releases entirely.
Take Jungle Cruise, Disney’s newest release with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Emily Blunt and Jack Whitehall (a british comedian who’s Netflix show Travels with my Father never fails to amuse) as its three enterprising leads. One the plucky woman ahead of her time, one the very English ‘fop’ whose idea of an adventure is having tea hotter than lukewarm, and one charismatic old hand with a secret… and a leopard.
Watching it, I did have to wonder what my choice of viewing would have been if I’d done more than assume I’d like the film because I happen to like watching the lead actors.
The film is set in 1916, two years into the First World War (as the film helpfully points out), and starts in suitably dreary London. Here, brother and sister duo Macgregor and Lilly (Whitehall and Blunt) conspire to gain access to a museum collection that will lead them to the tree of life, found deep in the Amazonian rainforest, and set them on the path of their very own Jungle Cruise captained by the mysterious Frank (Johnson).
Theoretically, the film should be a solid adventure offering from Disney to tweens—and an easy enough watch for parents—but it flounders in shallow waters very early on. Part of the problem is it’s not quite sure what it wants to be—the story is shaded with Indiana Jones, Pirates of the Caribbean, and The African Queen, and ends up confusing itself because it tries to be all those things instead of just one. There’s a twist at one point that, on reflection, I would never have seen coming, but it also felt less like a twist and more like a sharp right turn away from the story told in the first half of the film.
The storyline confusion ends up impacting the pacing of the film; the middle in particular suffers from bloating as it frantically tries to include everything in the script. At two and a half hours, Jungle Cruise is a long film for the audience it’s trying to attract—and when it struggles, it drags. There’s also questionable portrayals of Indigenous tribes, a very strange bit part from Paul Giamatti, and the occasional feel of green screen—none of which helps the story along.
The performances never quite settle into the story, either.
This isn’t the worst performance I’ve seen from Johnson, but it’s also not his best. While he does play Frank comfortably, he struggles with some of the more dramatic moments in the film and his physicality is slightly sidelined, to his detriment. He does have some good moments, but Frank feels like one too many of the same character and that easy charisma Johnson exudes in his films begins to flag through this one.
His chemistry with Blunt is awkward too, and they never seem to find a rhythm throughout the film. Blunt is, as always, good in this film—but like Johnson, I’ve seen better performances from her. She does bring some vitality to the role of Lily and she is admirably believable as the enterprising woman determined to sail through the Amazon, but her character suffers from being two-dimensional and slips into a caricature of a ‘woman ahead of her time!’ too often.
Whitehall is genuinely good in this film—he plays into his bit as the transplanted, foolish Brit incredibly well and he mostly hits his mark with the one-liners set up for comic relief. He is, out of all of the actors, clearly having a ball on this film and the sarcasm of his character does stop Frank and Lily’s bickering from veering from cute to irritating.
Jesse Plemons (Breaking Bad, Fargo) plays the required villain in this bloated film. A German villain, of course, shaped as all German villains seem to be in these films: with a taste for violence to the sound of classical music, a fastidiousness that can only be German, and an accent plumbed from the deepest study of Hollywood’s greatest villains (I will say, the obsessive hunt for mystical objects does feel like it would be better suited to the later war, but I digress). Despite the generic villainy of his character, Plemons does an admirable job with what is very little character; his villain is evil without being terrifying, and he’s ridiculous enough that he doesn’t feel threatening.
The thing is, while it’s too long and tries to do too many things, this isn’t really a bad film. It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon film for the kids that could hold their attention well enough, but not so well they’d think too hard about it.
So, knowing now what I didn’t when I sat down to watch this film: would I see Jungle Cruise in the cinema, spend money for premier access, or just wait for it to be available?
Honestly? I’d wait for Jungle Cruise to be available via streaming and go to the cinemas when it’s a film you really want to see.
Leave a Reply