Jungle Cruise is the new Disney film based off one of their theme park rides (Pirates of the Caribbean was also based off of a theme park ride and became a successful film franchise) and stars Emily Blunt as Dr Lily Houghton who along with her brother (Jack Whitehall) are determined to travel along the Amazon to find a tree called the Tears of the Moon who is said to contain materials that can cure any disease but to get there they’ll need the help of a tour guide captain (Dwayne Johnson) and avoid the German prince (Jesse Plemons.)
I was looking forward to Jungle Cruise despite its year long delay due to the pandemic as I liked the preview I saw for this movie, it used a Creedence song Run Through the Jungle and it gave off a big Tintin vibe which I’m a devotee of and Johnson in the previews for this movie gave off a good Captain Haddock vibe but could this movie deliver the goods or end up shipwrecked at sea.
Well it is neither of those instead this is really another Disney film where it’s fine, it’s perfectly entertaining in moments but it feels very forgettable and that’s kind of disappointing for me.
Don’t get me wrong the film has its moments and those moments are really when Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson are on screen together trading lines and they have a great chemistry together but there is a lot of movie around them that doesn’t work.
- First of all the brother character played by Jack Whitehall feels like a human version of the animal sidekicks from a Disney animation film and whereas those characters like Abu or Sebastian or Cogsworth and Lumiere were done very well here it feels very out of place and every time he came on screen I just felt like he got in the way of Blunt and Johnson as I didn’t think he was very funny or very useful and the film would’ve worked better without him.
- Secondly a lot of the storytelling feels like a very old fashioned Disney film and not the best kind either, the vibe I got from a lot of it was that of a late 70s/early 80s Disney live action film and I really thought that style had gone out of fashion when Jeffrey Katzenburg took over the production side of Disney in the 80s and they started to lift their game on that side of things with the advent of Touchstone and later Hollywood Pictures but alas it seems I was wrong as the tribe scenes felt very old fashioned in the vein I just outlined.
Meanwhile the visual effects did look very computer-ish at times and it’s a shame that given the year long delay this movie has had due to the pandemic that the effects weren’t retooled to look a lot better before its release the time was there to do it and I wish the opportunity was taken to fix the effects before its new release date.
As for the villains well Jesse Plemons has been fun in other movies (he really shines in Game Night) but here it feels very cartoonish and silly and I wish the Germans here had been more of a threat and also setting this story in World War 1 was a bit of a mistake and again I wish those involved had seen that mistake and set this movie during the Spanish Flu pandemic it might have given the story more weight.
And so that was Jungle Cruise and its fine but not Disney at it’s best, 2 out of 5.
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