Disney movies aren’t real. Well, obviously – but with other movies there’s usually an attempt to provide audiences with a real experience. Put another way, where other movies generally try to be the movie version of something real, it's fair to say Disney movies aim to be the amusement park version of that experience. And considering Jungle Cruise is loosely based on a Disney ride, you can probably guess where this is going.
Things start out surprisingly well, first in 1916 London where Doctor Lily Houghton (Emily Blunt) is rummaging through the back rooms of some stuffy explorers club while her brother MacGregor (Jack Whithall) is blathering away distracting them with a failed attempt to borrow an artifact that they’ve just secretly sold to German Prince Joachim (Jesse Plemons). And yes, World War One is currently raging, making these explorers also traitors? And nobody in the UK recognised the Kaiser’s son walking the streets of London?
These questions are swiftly forgotten thanks to some fun sequences as Lily grabs the mysterious arrowhead then ducks and weaves through the collection to escape. Next stop, the Amazon, where Frank “Skipper” Wolff (Dwayne Johnson) is taking his shoddy boat out as part of actual jungle cruises, which also seems a little ahistorical but he tells a lot of really bad jokes so who cares.
The Houghtons want to go upriver to find a mythical tree whose flowers can cure any illness, Wolff wants to get paid so he can settle his many debts, there’s a number of chase sequences as everyone runs around like nutcases, Joachim turns up in a submarine, and the whole first act wraps up in an over-the-top orgy of destruction that would have been the climax of a smaller yet possibly better film.
Director Jaume Collet-Serra (The Commuter, The Shallows) has made his name with films that pile incident atop incident to thrilling effect: character work, not so much. As the action moves up river the film is increasingly split between always engaging set pieces and unimpressive attempts to persuade the audience that there’s some kind of romantic spark between Lily and Frank (MacGregor gets to be the twit who eventually comes good). The banter as scripted isn't bad and they're both likable characters in their own right, but together? Half the time they’re barely convincing as workmates.
This is a problem, because flirty banter and feisty arguments are the stock-in-trade of the (older, better) films this is a Disney version of. The lack of risk in this cruise up a supposedly deadly river is a bit of a problem too: the early scenes manage to balance cartoony bad guys (exactly what accent is Paul Giamatti's rival cruise operator meant to have?) with equally cartoony chases, but when things are meant to be getting serious later on this often finds itself with no real way to up the stakes.
A quartet of supernatural conquistadors (with Edgar Ramirez playing their leader) cursed to live forever so long as they never leave the river should fill this role, but murky fight sequences and a plot twist or two largely defuse their threat - though they are at least memorably creepy to look at.
Jungle Cruise is still entertaining, and its flaws aren't entirely the fault of the Disney approach: Johnson can do a lot of things, but playing a human being struggling with romantic feelings isn't one of them. But this kind of lightweight adventure desperately needs something believably human underneath all the monsters and deathtraps. It's a lesson in the limits of how far spectacle can take you without real stakes; the result is a film that too often finds itself up the creek without a paddle.
- Anthony Morris
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