What to say about Jungle Cruise, Disney’s latest attempt to mine existing IP for franchise potential and big box office ducats, that isn’t already implied by its existence? For all intents and purposes, the movie is fine. An unremarkable, CGI-heavy “throwback” to the swashbuckling serials of the 1920’s, Jungle Cruise doesn’t hide its obvious aspirations to turn a Disneyland ride into another major media franchise a la Pirates of the Caribbean. The result is filmmaking as pure commerce, the beancounters at the House of Mouse barely containing their cynicism for audiences who see marquee names and a decently cut trailer and rush to cinemas (or, now, Disney+) to trade in their hard earned dollars for 127 minutes of chiseled, forgettable fantasy-adventure mediocrity.
Though not without its small charms, Jungle Cruise is the kind of movie where 20 minutes in, you get it. Disney is on cruise control here. They know the game. Though technically an “original” work, they pilfer and borrow from their own past successes, Frankensteining Jungle Cruise into being through pure force of will and bottomless pockets. Were I not obliged to review the film, I would have turned it off and done so gladly. Again, it’s not that it’s bad so much as it is precisely the kind of film that just hovers on the edge of one’s consciousness. One where you have to make a concerted effort to pay attention and not drift off and think about any number of more interesting or pressing matters. Jungle Cruise would play perfectly at a kid’s party were you not forced to pay attention to it.
Focus-grouped into hitting just the right beats at just the right times, shuffling from action set piece to smarmy joke to action set piece to smarmy joke, sure to squeeze in the studio-approved ratio of astonishment and gentle giggles, Jungle Cruise paints by expertly-defined numbers. If it feels like you’ve seen this movie before, it’s because you pretty much have. Ostensibly written by Michael Green (Logan), Glenn Fircarra (Bad Santa 2), and John Requa (Bad News Bears), Jungle Cruise feels in actuality as if it were written by an algorithm.
So manicured are these pastures that one wonders if even the jungle itself is a studio backlot (just kidding, it certainly is.) Though Green, Fircarra, Requa and the algorithm attempt to shine some supernatural mystique into the equation, there are no great mysteries here beyond how Spanish-born director Jaume Collet-Serra (The Shallows) thought he could pull the wool over audiences’ eyes long enough to deceive them into thinking this was ever anymore more than Pirates-lite.
[READ MORE: Our review of Disney’s live-action dreadful ‘Aladdin’ remake]
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is there to make some cringy puns and be physically imposing/100% family-friendly. Emily Blunt charms as a lady adventurer who wears (gasp!) pants. Jesse Plemons does his best Christoph Waltz in Inglorious Bastards impression as a German adversary with fuzzy motives. The remainder of the cast over-chews the scenery or flounders into forgettable mediocrity. Or, in a sunburnt and shrieky Paul Giamatti’s case, both. My experience wasn’t helped by the fact that the screener of the film provided by Disney lacked subtitles, leaving pretty much everything that main protagonist Aguirre (Edgar Ramírez) and his crew said a mystery.
From a purely audio-visual standpoint, Collet-Serra’s creation is simply too much. Sonically booming, the film’s sound is cranked up to 11 early on and never dialed down. A chaotic cacophonous smear of computer-animated business, graphically, the film is a muddy mess. Even the jungle pirate creature design feels pulled from the Dead Man’s Chest reject pile. As we press into a third act with vine swinging, sword fighting, and fresh water submarines, one strains to track what exactly is happening and why they ought to be invested in it.
Though not as creatively bankrupt as Disney’s recent live-action Lion King remake, there just isn’t anything resembling a soul here. Or, to borrow the overused phraseology from Gertrude Stein, there is no there there. In trying to blend Pirates of the Caribbean, The Mummy, and Romancing the Stone together, Jungle Cruise arrives more closely resembling 2013’s Lone Ranger; full of technical merit with some solid talent attached but fundamentally confused and lacking entirely in an identity of its own.
CONCLUSION: Bland, inoffensive, and familiar, theme park ride turned movie ‘Jungle Cruise’ feels as bumpy and predictable as a trip on one of Disneyland’s oldest rides.
C-
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