Who among us hasn’t, at some point in our lives, found ourselves sitting on the quaint, kitschy “Jungle Cruise” ride at a Disney theme park and thought, This should be a movie? Well, okay; many people have not had that thought, because Disney theme parks are a wildly expensive luxury and because the ride—an animatronic, animal-filled boat-on-rails trip to a faux exotic wilderness—doesn’t have much scope. It’s just a little Disney ritual one does before going to the bigger, more thrilling, newer stuff.
But, of course, “Pirates of the Caribbean” was largely the same thing until, 18 years ago, it became a film franchise that would go on to gross $4.5 billion. So Disney is attempting the same alchemy with “Jungle Cruise,” figuring the brand identity is strong enough to support a developed world of CGI bluster and mythology. The result is Jungle Cruise (in theaters and on Disney+ July 30), which endeavors to make grand cinema magic out of an 8-minute tour.
For a little while, it almost works. The film borrows heavily from adventure classics older (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and newer (1999’s The Mummy) to cobble a sense of place and occasion around the barest of frameworks. It’s 1916 and the Great War is raging, far off camera. Lily (Emily Blunt, too good for this) is a dashing explorer who longs to travel to the Amazon to investigate the legend of a tree whose flower can, it’s said, be used to cure every known ailment. Lily’s foppish brother, MacGregor (Jack Whitehall), has to do the public talking for her, bound as she is by the strict gender codes of the day. She’s able and adept at everything else, though, quick and nimble with a punch, a kick, and a daring escape.
In Brazil, Lily and MacGregor employ the services of Frank, a ne’er-do-well boat captain played with familiar smirk by Dwayne Johnson. Blunt and Whitehall’s British fuss doesn’t mix naturally with Johnson’s half-ironic and very American flexing, but they work hard to conjure up a cohesive mood together. They’re winning enough performers that they can sustain Jungle Cruise on charm alone for the first act or so. Director Jaume Collet-Serra seems to relish the chance to ply his talent for elegant schlock on something deliberately light and goofy; he sets a playful mood that the cast happily grooves on.
Before too long, though, the demands of the enterprise come to ruin the party. Jungle Cruise tries strenuously to re-create the delicate balancing act of Pirates, which juggled analog swashbuckling with supernatural flights of fancy, contemporary sardonic humor with old-fashioned cornball patter. Jungle Cruise essentially uses that exact mold, swapping out ghost pirates for undead conquistadors. But there is no Johnny Depp-esque centerpiece to send the whole thing spinning into dada art—and without that leavening energy, it’s too easy to see the strained seams of the project. Pirates was a rollicking surprise; Jungle Cruise feels only grimly inevitable.
The latter film has the extra onus of existing in 2021, when there are more demands put on corporations to be responsible, and even thoughtful, about matters of representation. The film offers up some limp meta commentary on the white-explorers-among-the-natives trope that was the underscoring of the original ride, which comes off smug. And there is the matter of MacGregor, a fashion-obsessed ninny who does actually have a (short) scene in which he kinda, sorta, all-but-the-specific-word comes out as gay. It’s at least more direct than other recent Disney efforts to throw a queer character into the mix. But only a few scenes later, MacGregor is the butt (pun intended) of some gay panic jokes that have Johnson stridently affirming his hetero status.
This is a rare vehicle for Johnson in which he functions as a romantic lead, as Frank and Lily’s sparring turns to flirting turns to love. The film has trouble selling us on their chemistry, though, and a wild (yet predictable) plot twist doesn’t disrupt their fated trajectory in the way that it probably should. Maybe it’s just the shock of seeing something approaching sexual tension in a Disney film these days, or maybe it’s something else, something more ineffable. But the romance seems awkwardly shoehorned in, a reference to an older era of blockbuster filmmaking that hangs strangely on Jungle Cruise’s, and Johnson’s, smooth musculature.
As the film meanders down the Amazon, it quickly loses its vim. Jesse Plemmons tries to liven things up as a sinister prince vying to secure the magic flower MacGuffin for Germany, but his gonzo accent and sideways line readings aren’t enough to combat the film’s plodding, programmatic momentum. There is a big final clash in which mystical stuff happens and nothing makes much sense—and then the film is over, all of its noise and motion fluttering away as if it never happened. Jungle Cruise is a two-hour movie that has far less consequence than a ride that’s a small fraction of that length. The experience the film more accurately simulates is the standing in line: all that tedious waiting in the heat for the fun to start.
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