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Constrained by Disney Oversight, Jungle Cruise is Nontheless a Fun Adventure


The Disney theme park attraction Jungle Cruise does not strike me as a particularly interesting idea for a movie. From my understanding it’s mostly a safari through an animatronic recreation of various “exotic”-themed environments. Not all that different from an actual jungle cruise -only fake. Disney’s previous efforts at turning their rides into movies have at least had something more of a hook or a baked-in premise, like Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion. But of course none of their theme park-based movies have succeeded like that first Pirates flick in both critical and commercial appeal, so an offbeat idea like turning a riverboat tour into a movie is actually a relatively subversive move for a company that usually hates that sort of thing. Jungle Cruise doesn’t have the notoriety as a ride that those aforementioned ones do -all I’d ever known it for was Weird Al’s “Skipper Dan” song and the fact it apparently had a lot of racist iconography recently dialed back. And this allows some freedom for a film adaptation that isn’t particularly common of Disney’s live-action movies of late.
Still, Jungle Cruise is a movie that is clearly chasing Pirates of the Caribbean -it plays in the same sandbox of indistinct mysticism, curses, and other such folk magic, as it spins a very traditional action adventure story set along the Peruvian Amazon that links sixteenth century conquistadors and early twentieth century scientists on a quest for the healing properties of the “Tears of the Moon”, a.k.a. the Tree of Life. Of course the influence extends to other popular action adventure movies as well, most explicitly The Mummy (the 1999 Stephen Sommers one), with the three main characters occupying the exact same archetypes: Dwayne Johnson is Skipper Frank, the cool, charismatic adventurer and guide, Emily Blunt is Lily, the determined intellectual and early feminist who hires him, and Jack Whitehall is her camp, stuffy brother MacGregor along for the ride (his much talked about gayness being expressed exactly as safely and noncommittally as I anticipated). With these heroes in possession of a MacGuffin and being pursued by a German prince in a U-boat, in addition to more supernatural foes, its’ clear Disney has invented a story designed to appeal to fans of a particular strain of classic action-adventure. And it kinda works.
Jungle Cruise benefits from a distinct understanding of what it needs to be, and seems distinctly aware of its’ limitations as a Disney movie. The Disney that greenlit this film is not the same company that made that first Pirates of the Caribbean, with its’ teen-skewing sense of humour, director-guided vision, and touches of darkness that could never be found in a project today. And so it makes no impressions that way, doesn’t ever style itself in the visual language of a Pirates film or attempt to make Johnson into simply a watered down version of Jack Sparrow (as in the Jack Sparrow from the later films). Johnson does get to imbue a little more nuance to his character than is strictly typical for him -there are some notable secrets and a backstory that provide him thematic heft to work with- but it’s not anything too ambitious. This is a family-friendly adventure and the movie is content in that simplicity.
It also helps that the movie is genuinely fun a lot more often than I expected it to be. Director Jaume Collet-Serra may be coming off of several Liam Neeson-led action movies, but he knows how to adapt those instincts to a different audience. There are some nice, inventive action scenes here, especially along that riverfront town that is Franks’ home base, and Collet-Serra shoots some of the sillier antics (like Frank swinging from a rope down into his cockpit) with a kind of endearing thrill. It’s befitting too of the silly sense of humour, Frank having a penchant for bad jokes and puns. Johnson is fun, and he has good chemistry with Blunt who, for as thinly defined as her character is, makes for a great foil. Jesse Plemons is likewise having a blast as a fictionalized version of Prince Joachim, a villain straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, as is Paul Giamatti in a small role as the fuming port manager –they understand this movies’ type perhaps better than Édgar Ramírez, whose reinvention of Lope de Aguirre (yes, from the Herzog film) as a noble Spanish father corrupted by an obsession with the Tree of Life rings a little self-serious and stale. That may be due to the script though, which identifies him as not much more than a zombie monster in spite of the curious backstory created for him.
He is one of the primary vessels through which the movie attempts to atone for the unsavory racism and heavy colonial themes of the attraction. A white European explorer, his pillaging of a native village when they don’t give him what he wants is framed as unequivocally bad, but also anomalous -as though out of character for a conquistador. Like most of their other past transgressions, Disney’s preferred method of dealing with colonialism is to ignore it. Frank is friends with a local tribe whom he employs for his tours, and his Georgian-era British clients are pretty respectful towards the indigenous as well. This treatment of such subject matter has little adverse effect, but like in The Princess and the Frog it’s highly conspicuous.
And it is this and other such modern Disney signatures that hold Jungle Cruise back where it might otherwise be great. In fact, it definitively proves that Disney is incapable of making a truly great movie in live-action in the company’s current form -it’s just too tethered to its’ filmmaking safety nets. CGI is a big one, as though they’ve gotten better at rendering environments, including in this film (the production never set foot in South America yet it looks pretty nice -though London has never been more artificial), they continue to struggle down other avenues. I sound like a broken record, but their CGI animals are still distractingly fake, and in the special effects arenas, the work looks pretty generic. The script, which isn’t terribly bright, is also full of that whimsical Disney branded humour that works when paired with capable actors, as in this film (though the “Pants” running joke gets old after the second reference), but doesn’t have any real cleverness behind it. And the characterization efforts are consciously minimal -only Frank is terribly interesting, and even his major character development is undercut by comedy. A chance to circumvent this lied in the MacGregor character, but it would have meant centering his sexuality more and Disney is unwilling to do that. Because of this, Whitehall’s casting controversy hardly matters (he plays the part to a Bertie Wooster buffoon type, and not all badly at that).
These things bother me, but Jungle Cruise was able to charm me over just enough in spite of them. Indeed it’s probably the first altogether satisfying blockbuster from Disney’s live-action division since I don’t know, Spielberg’s BFG maybe? And I’ll admit, as imperfect and micromanaged as it is, it’s nice to see an action-adventure movie like this again. Treading in the footsteps of Indiana Jones and The Mummy over more zeitgeist-y fare is not a bad thing after all.

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