REVIEW: Jungle Cruise

 

Disney has relied on branding for their box-office since Walt himself started using fairy-tales as a launching pad. Flash forward 80 years, and the branding wars have escalated not just within the Disney company, but the industry all around. Disney's Jungle Cruise walks the line between original and remix, and not just because it's adapted from a theme-park ride. This film, a pastiche of adventure flicks over the last 60 years, absorbs the best from its sources of inspiration but falls just short of congealing them into something truly groundbreaking.

Tales a mythical tree of life have beckoned explorers since it bloomed into legend hundreds of years ago. This catches the interest of explorer Lily Houghton who makes it her mission to find the tree, first to distribute its gifts to the world and second to keep it from the hands of less benevolent seekers. Her success hinges on joining forces with the gruff Frank Wolff. He'll ferry Lily and her brother, McGregor, across the dangerous Amazonian waters. For a decent price.

What follows is a series of puzzles and roller-coaster rides of varying intensity. The most effective of these are intricate and clever, like rube goldberg machines built from ancient curses, intense gymnastics, and housetrained leopards. In this way, the film adaptation maintains the best of the interactive theme park ride experience. 

The design of this world sells the adventure as well. Not just with the gargantuan sets or the textured CGI, but even the screen's golden tint recalls old explorer's maps from a lost age. All that money spent on cutting-edge computer graphics and still the film manages to feel like a page from decades ago.

    Captaining this adventure are A-listers Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt. Both of them are effortlessly charismatic and feel entirely at home with one another. The worst that could be said of them is that their dynamic, while entertaining, never takes on an identity of its own. The homage to Boggart and Hepburn is maybe a little too overwhelming.

The supporting cast includes Jesse Plemmons who gets points for trying to be a villain who's both frightening and comical. Jack Whitehall meanwhile brings a gentle humanity to McGregor, a third-wheel to the dynamic duo who easily could have been expendable if not for Whitehall's performance. It helps that the writing never goes overboard with his neuroses or eccentricities. (The same could not be said for their "empowerment" arc for Lily, whom other characters literally refer to as "the woman wearing pants" throughout the film.)

For all the thrills, the film does take a little too much of a good thing, like a giant tub of butter popcorn you can't expect your audience to consume in one movie. It's a mental exercise in community vs solitude. It's a revisionist take on conquistadorian history. It's Disney's own metatextual commentary on the thrills of artifice and deception. It's a little bit of everything, and it's all a little bit crowded. Rather than meaningfully engaging with any one (or even just two) of these ideas, the film mostly points them out as they cruise past like they are just side-attractions on this theme park ride. 

Things like thematic unity or character texture matter little within the format of theme park rides. But in the world of feature film, even the summer blockbuster, these make the difference between sinking or swimming. Jungle Cruise is just light enough to coast, but by the time we get around to the Jason Mamoa led film of "It's a Small World," let's hope Disney's learned how to commit to one track. 

        --The Professor