'Jungle Cruise' Is Fun But Tries To Be Too Many Things
Starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Edgar Ramirez, Jack Whitehall, Jesse Plemons, Paul Giamatti
Rated PG-13
Action, Adventure, Comedy
Run time: 2 hr, 7 min
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
In theaters July 30, 2021
It’d be easy to roll your eyes at the idea of a movie being made about an amusement park ride, but we’re in a post-Pirates of the Caribbean world, so naturally, Disney’s going to try to capture lightning in a bottle one more time. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to do that twice. (Shouldn’t we have learned that from Haunted Mansion?) The formula is the same: solid cast + some rollicking scenes that remind you this is in fact based off a ride + a dash of romance + a hint of adventure + an ending that puts a tidy bow on everything. The problem is, sometimes with that many ingredients, the recipe can get a bit jumbled and taste a little flat, even if the individual components are good on their own.
Jungle Cruise is - brace yourself - about a river cruise in the jungle. Dr. Lily Houghton (Blunt) and her brother, MacGregor (Whitehall), go on an adventure in hopes of finding a mystical tree whose petals can somehow cure potentially any malady. They employ Frank Wolff (Johnson) to take them down the river to seek out this never-before-recovered plant, and naturally, chaos ensues. There is also a prince named Joachim (Plemons), who wants this tree too, because of course there is. The rest of the film is just that - a race to get to that elusive tree, with a lot of hiccups along the way. Oh, and there are some cursed ancient pirate-type-beings who got derailed on their quest to find the tree a few hundred years prior.
If you read that summary and went, “Wait that sounds a lot like Pirates, minus the animal sidekick,” well, you’re in luck, because there is one. But it’s a jaguar instead of an undead monkey. The farther into the movie I got, the more I realized how much this was trying to follow almost an identical formula of that Captain. Jack Sparrow saga. But it was trying too hard. There were absolutely some very delightful moments, some gorgeous shots of the tropical environment and some witticisms that drew a handful of chuckles from the audience. There’s even a conversation that is the closest Disney has gotten up to this point about the LGBTQ community, which was a pleasant surprise. But a lot of that was overshadowed to me as I kept comparing it to the previous movies who did this kind of thing a bit better.
It’s weirdly more difficult to parse out what makes a movie okay than on either other end of the spectrum. The only truly solid complaint I can make about Jungle Cruise is the film’s determination to pigeonhole some romance into the plot, instead of being the delightful breath of fresh air that it could have been sans feelsy moments. This was an opportunity to do something just a bit different, and with films like Moana or Brave under their belt, I was hoping Disney would embrace it. Instead, it just was the most Disney of Disney things and tried to include every facet of the movies they’re known for, which made each aspect of it feel underserved and - at times - forced. but if you’re just looking for a fun, entertaining movie that has something for almost everyone, it’s worth a watch, whether on your couch through Disney+ or in a theater to escape the summer heat.