Disney’s wild ride is silly family fun
Jungle Cruise 12A cert, 127 min
Dir: Jaume Collet-serra; Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Jack Whitehall, Jesse Plemons, Paul Giamatti, Edgar Ramírez
Early on in Disney’s Jungle Cruise, the passengers on a tour boat wending down the Amazon in the 1910s express some doubts about the vessel they’ve chosen. The skipper, Frank (Dwayne Johnson), talks a good game amid his barrage of intentionally excruciating puns, but his engine has a habit of clapping out and his helmsmanship lurches alarmingly. He’s paid, he reminds them, by how many people he entices on board, not how many happy customers he brings back alive.
Welcome, as a viewer, to Jungle Cruise. As a summer action blockbuster derived from Disney’s riverboat attraction of the same name, this is gunning for the four-quadrant appeal that made Pirates of the Caribbean take off some 20 years ago. It firmly gambles on throwback nostalgia to the likes of Romancing the Stone and The African Queen. Johnson and Emily Blunt look to be having a blast on the press tour, so who wouldn’t want to join this fetching, squabble-prone duo on a hairy expedition to find some kind of legendary tropical flower?
The shape-shifting, undead conquistadors come straight from the theme park attraction
We’re all aboard, and there’s certainly some enjoyment to be had. It’s just a pity that the ride is a bit of a con, at times. It’s a template without spark, a formula which seldom takes the risk of experimenting with anything fresh. It needed some of that old Spielbergian magic.
The director, Jaume Collet-serra, has shown a lot of savvy B-movie instincts to date, on the likes of (his three best films) Orphan, Non-stop and The Shallows. Still, those were contained stories with just a handful of suspense elements to juggle. This is a sprawling, rattletrap effects behemoth with a $200million (£145m) budget. Collet-serra barely clings on to the wheel when shapeshifting undead conquistadors or a dastardly
German submarine crash the party. Ported straight over from the ride as they may be, the various ideas often get in each other’s way, amid flurries of stopgap CGI which suggest the money didn’t go quite as far as everyone hoped.
Speaking of unwanted intrusions, the easy-to-root-for star pairing has a third wheel tied to its legs in the shape of Jack Whitehall, who plays the prissy younger brother and constant companion of daredevil botanist Dr Lily Houghton (Blunt). The latter seems half the actress in every scene she has to share with Whitehall, for reasons that are partly the script’s fault and also his. Given the pretty basic task of camping it up as a supercilious fussbudget, he fluffs it. As for Blunt, whenever she’s furious, she’s always fun.
It would be easy to come down too hard on Jungle Cruise: I can feel myself doing so. For all its limitations, it will probably do the job for families – after all, it’s unlikely many sevenyear-olds will share my disappointment with the slapdash sound mix or muddy grading.
While other elements strain for laughs, there’s at least a legitimately funny performance from Jesse Plemons as a villain called Prince Joachim, an Imperial German aristocrat who has the same designs on these flowers (“the tears of the moon”, they’re called) that Raiders’ Nazis had on the ark.
With his floppy hair and debauched accent, Plemons makes the best case for what Jungle Cruise might have been – he’s so away with the fairies as to be goofily endearing. The thing with Cruise is that it’s half stupid, half scared of admitting as much – a blockbuster scrabbling to smother its inner idiot, when all anyone involved should have
done is befriend it.
In cinemas now