Jungle Cruise
disneyMixing nostalgia with the modern algorithm results for how to get the biggest box office one can, Disney's Jungle Cruise brings the concept of the original Disneyland ride to life. The confident Dr. Lily Houghton (Emily Blunt) along with nerve-ridden brother McGregor (Jack Whitehall) travel from London to the deep forests of the Amazon where they enlist the help of the ever-clever boat skipper Frank Wolff (Dwayne Johnson) to travel the rivers and find a mysterious tree that has the potential to cure every illness on earth. With a largely incompetent script that offers one of the most chaotically berserk rides of twists and turns seen in recent Disney history, Jungle Cruise might not be a great film but unintentionally becomes possibly one of the most fun when it comes to the most recent Disney live-action films.
The first thing that demands attention is the plot of Jungle Cruise. What starts as a very simple dynamic of a young adventurer with a needed mystical item being chased by a bad guy becomes a near-insane maze of supernatural curses, unforeseen twists, and boring character dynamics. Especially with the execution of the various twists and turns, as well as key moments, being horrifically bland and badly edited into the final feature, Jungle Cruise quickly finds new life as an off-kilter possible cult classic that is nearly endlessly offering something to laugh at. It is rare for the film to go even 10-minutes without something crazy happening. In a sequence of only a matter of minutes the film manages to have Dwayne Johnson wrestle a random jaguar in a bar, somehow steal an engine, have a twist involved with that very jaguar that Johnson wrestled, watch Emily Blunt be put into a cage, have an entire sequence of Johnson and Blunt battle bad guys and free numerous caged animals, have a speedy boat getaway, reveal the villains to be Nazis, and blow up an entire building. This is a 10-minute series of events that have little to no poetry with how the film builds these scenes yet their sheer escalation and insanity is near impossible not to put smiles on most faces.
What helps drastically is the awkward relationship between Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson that caused weirdly stiff acting from two generally good actors. Their bickering goes personal and the scenes of them opening up to each other feel awkward as both Johnson and Blunt feel so defined by strange gimmicks of characters that they cannot breathe or find natural ways to deliver their admittedly strange dialogue. Everything within both the plot and the performances is competent enough to be watchable but are just bad enough to be fun enough to laugh at, which can trick the brain enough to register the film as a positive experience even if this clearly isn't how the film wanted to achieve that feeling.
This sense of fun clearly is the saving grace of the movie, as the plot is truly awful. Incredibly overwritten and convoluted, the feature is not only hard to understand but is simply not engaging. For every bizarre twist and turn, the film will use predictable base formulas to execute its story with the audience having very little to latch on to. Another clear issue is the film's gargantuan 127-minute runtime. For such a generic story coming from a company that has dozens of features doing the same basic idea, the idea to stretch this runtime out is possibly the biggest fault to the film overall. Even with the chaotic fun which is the film, the ending does drag and especially with such a predictable formula it is hard not to check the clock and sigh with just how much of the film the audience is aware they will have to sit through.
Even from a technical level, Jungle Cruise is a shaky boat. While the costume design and production design are rather solid, the visual effects feel disappointingly flat and noticeably weaker, which is a real shame as Disney themselves have proven to be a master at this in other projects. The score from the legendary James Newton Howard is equally strange. While the more basic and expected swells work fine, the film incorporates some incredibly out-of-place rock notes that really come across as jarring yet granted does provide the thing to laugh at for those few minutes.
The last thing to need discussing is the film's use of representation. The PR news cycle between every film Disney is associated with is starting to play like a broken record. Jungle Cruise is simply the newest of dozens of features by Disney to promote their first LGBTQ+ character and, once again, Disney drops the ball. To have a coming out story years after you started to try and exploit the LGBTQ+ market – promoting gay stories only to hide them in easily enough edited out segments to please China while also not every being expressly gay to please republicans – and not even be able to say the word "gay" is laughable. What is more is how Disney continues to play into hardcore stereotypes for their "queer" characters, proving no evolution or attempt for actual proper representation. The film also has quite an uncomfortable relationship to indigenous tribes of the Amazon, which is a confusing inclusion considering the backlash Disney has historically faced for their usage on the physical ride. Rather than pointing fingers at the film itself, it is beyond clear these issues are the responsibility of Disney overall, and for any attention given to this company, it is important to continue to call them out and push them to be better.
Jungle Cruise is in no way a good film, but it is hard to say one shouldn't check out the film either. Unlike the vast majority of other recent Disney Live-Action features, Jungle Cruise is a film easy to have a good time with, especially if one is of age to have a few adult beverages before the runtime. While this might not be the positive reception Disney was hoping for, at this point, it should feel like a success to get any positive takeaway at all.
