Film Review - Jungle Cruise (2021)

 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.

Film Review - Snake Eyes: GI Joe Origins (2021)

 Snake Eyes is the newest film in the GI Joe film series and this time Henry Golding stars as Snake Eyes who as a young boy saw his father murdered in front of him and has grown up on the streets until he rescues a young man from the Yakuza who repays that debt by taking him into his clan in Japan but sinister forces are on the loose for this clan possess a great jewel capable of destroying the entire world.

 

Snake Eyes is sadly like Monster Hunter from earlier this year in that I didn’t have a lot of high hopes for it just some escapist fun in the cinema but it fails like Monster Hunter did to deliver on that fun and is extremely boring and there are 2 clear reasons for this:

 

- Firstly the action scenes are fucking terrible, so many of them are either over edited with shaky cam or quick camera movements or they take place at night in low lighting and everyone is wearing dark clothing and you can’t tell who’s fighting who and its awful to watch, the street I walked down after I saw the film had better lighting than the action scenes in this movie and also despite the huge amount of sword fights in this movie there’s no Blood not one drop and it doesn’t feel like a proper Ninja movie without the blood on the floor.

 

- And secondly the storytelling is very predictable here, there are numerous attempts to connect this movie to the broader GI Joe universe and it doesn’t work very well at all and whenever those references came up I just wanted a proper GI Joe film with the kind of outlandishness that the Fast and Furious films have which have more and more developed that live action cartoon feel that a GI Joe film I feel should have but here it didn’t work and it’s a real shame.

 

As for the cast they do their best but only Henry Golding really stands out and seeing him in this movie has convinced me that he would be a great James Bond after Daniel Craig leaves the part with No Time to Die (can that film please hurry up and come out already) though Henry Cavill will give him stiff competition for that part.

 

And so that was Snake Eyes and now you know that this movie sucks and Knowing is Half the Battle, 1 out of 5.

Film Review - Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021)

 Space Jam: A New Legacy is the newest Space Jam sequel following the first film with Michael Jordan in 1996 and this movie its Lebron James as the Basketball star who’s son is kidnapped by the Warner Bros 3000 program (Don Cheadle) after they have an argument so now Lebron must put together a new Tune Squad to battle the Warner 3000 team on the Basketball Court for his son’s freedom.

 

Space Jam: A New Legacy was a movie that I did not have a lot of high hopes for as I was one of those kids who grew up with the 1996 original having seen it on the big screen that year and watching the video quite a bit and when I saw the previews for this film I feared the worst and began to think of 2016’s Independence Day: Resurgence which wasn’t awful but felt like a sequel to a film that didn’t really need one.

 

And that regrettably is pretty much the case here, Space Jam 2 is not an awful movie not in the least as there is some fun to be had here but the film feels more like an advertisement for Warner Brothers and the various properties its owns than making a good movie and there were a lot of times I sat there and went “What the Fuck” and not in a good way a lot of the time though there was one reference with the Road Runner that made me laugh.

 

And also this movie because of it focusing too much on the Warner Brothers angle just doesn’t feel like any kind of patch on the original which I still have a soft spot for as that was driven by Ivan Reitman as its chief producer and at least had a story that not only made sense but also had a love of the NBA at that time and the Looney Tunes characters who were also very popular then (their cartoons frequently featured on Warner Home Video releases in Australia in the mid 90s) and used that to tell a fun story whereas here the storytelling is second to how many references it can shove in at any one time and it becomes very tiresome.

 

And so that was Space Jam: A New Legacy a sequel that unlike A Quiet Place Part 2 which was a sequel that lived up to the original this sequel fails to live up to the original now it is not awful not in the least but its not a film that I can recommend to fans of the first film, just stick with that and leave it there and that goes as well for Independence Day, 2 out of 5.