Jungle Cruise (2021)

Film: Jungle Cruise (2021)

Stars: Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Edgar Ramirez, Jack Whitehall, Jesse Plemons, Paul Giamatti

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I am currently planning a trip in November to Disneyland and am hoping/praying/begging the universe to get the Covid pandemic to a point where I'll be able to actually take this trip (I cannot stress enough-find a way to convince your relatives or friends that have been holdouts that they need to get vaccinated, as they're going to kill us all).  I have been twice and at least one of those times I rode the Jungle Cruise ride in Adventureland, but I was a teenager when that happened, and I have no real memory of it other than my introverted self really wanted to ditch the friends I was with, but as we were on a school trip, we weren't really allowed to "go out by ourselves" without getting into trouble (I am that specific combination of introverted, independent, & Type-A that likely explains why I'm still single).  Hopefully this past week's viewing of Jungle Cruise the movie wasn't a preview of my trip, however, as I am going to be leaving pretty disappointed despite high expectations.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie starts with us learning of a cursed group of conquistadores who looked for a healing tree in the middle of the Amazon, but suffered a terrible fate.  Jump forward hundreds of years, in the middle of World War I, and we find Lily Houghton (Blunt) and her brother MacGregor (Whitehall) pitching the idea of a quest to find the healing tree, claiming it's real, to an adventurer's club, who doesn't want to support them because of, well, sexism.  Lily still goes to the Amazon, though, where they hire a guide named Frank (Johnson), who runs a ratty river tour in a rundown boat.  After she shows him an arrowhead that Frank (secretly) knows to be authentic, they begin the quest to find the tree, while being chased by Prince Joachim (Plemons), a deranged prince who is trying to use the tree to help Germany win the war.

The film has a few second-act twists (including one that you might not see coming even if it's somewhat obvious in retrospect), but that sort of gets you where you want to go here-it's an action-adventure film, after a mythical plant with the potential for a love story between the two leads.  And the love story works-Blunt & Johnson are not what you'd consider an obvious romantic pairing in Hollywood (he's an affable WWE superstar, she's, well, Mary Poppins), but they're fun together.  Johnson is not a great actor, but he is a winning movie star, and one of the better choices for this style of film working today, and Blunt's comic timing is impeccable.  Add in the genuinely funny Whitehall (more on the controversy surrounding him in a second, but he does know how to land a joke), and Plemons shooting for the rafters, and this has the trapping of mindless fun (and I can get behind that).

The problems, though, are that the acting can't save the film's clear pitfalls.  Jungle Cruise has been in development for decades (it was already on the docket after the first Pirates of the Caribbean), but they clearly didn't learn from that original film in terms of screenplay or visual effects.  The movie's writing is convoluted, with one too many random detours (surely trying to match some of the attractions on the rides-Disney knows nothing if they don't know corporate synergy), and a strange interlude in the middle of the film.  It's bold that Whitehall's character is meant to be gay, but the fact that they won't say the word (or give him any sort of love interest), is a bit of an eyeroll, particularly considering Disney doesn't intend for this to be a global phenomenon if it's going to put the film concurrently on its streaming platform (where, presumably, it'd be much easier to get around bans on gay characters in China & Russia).

But it's the effects that sink this ship.  The CGI in the film is garish, boring & omnipresent.  What made Pirates so magical wasn't just that Geoffrey Rush was transformed into a walking skeleton, but that he did so on real ships & in real ports.  CGI is not at the level where you can't tell what is real & what is fiction in the backgrounds, and while the film is shot on location in some sequences (Johnson regularly finds ways to film movies in his native Hawaii), most of the backgrounds appear as if they are lifeless digital recreations, which they are.  CGI is not the only solution for how to create authentic-looking sets (you need a quality art director who can actually build these), and oftentimes it feels like Blunt & Johnson are walking around in the middle of an animated cartoon...and not a visually innovative one.