In search of a mythical flower that will end human suffering, Dr. Lily Houghton (Emily Blunt) defies contemporary skepticism and commissions the sardonic skipper Frank Wolff (Dwayne Johnson) to ferry her and her brother (Jack Whitehall) up the Amazon River. Along the way, the trio is pursued by a cursed Spanish conquistador (Édgar Ramirez), a maniacal German prince (Jesse Plemons), and a harbormaster (Paul Giamatti) to whom Frank is deeply in debt.
At some point in Jungle Cruise – and this moment will vary for moviegoers – you’ll be reminded of a better movie that you’d rather be watching. Perhaps it’s early on, when the film’s opening flashback sequence and initial historical setting remind you of the structure of Stephen Sommers’s masterful Mummy. Perhaps you’ll pick up on the Bogart-esque performance of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (which is actually somewhat decent, inflected as it is by, above all, The African Queen). Or perhaps it’s the film’s second half, with cursed zombie conquistadors who seem airlifted from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Or maybe, just maybe, you’ll find yourself recognizing some of Frank Wolff’s deliberately bad jokes and wish that you were on the Jungle Cruise ride proper. At any rate, it is impossible to watch Jungle Cruise and think this is the best version of any of its disparate parts.
Despite drawing on such a wealth of source material and creative influences, Jungle Cruise all too often feels like it’s pulling its punches. The key, for example, to why the corny jokes work so well on the ride is because the skippers believe in the punchline and deliver it with a knowing wink. Here, Johnson seems to want to remain above the jokes, delivering them deadpan but almost begrudgingly, knowing yet not really caring that some true believers want to hear about “the backside of water.” Ditto the winks to Albert Falls and Trader Sam, legendary figures in Disney Parks lore but almost inconsequential easter eggs here. Where Johnson cuts a passable Bogart for about half the film, Emily Blunt is a disappointing remix of Rachel Weisz’s Evelyn Carnahan from The Mummy, lacking the charm and wit in favor of a corporately cynical “girlboss” attitude. And as seriously as the film takes itself, it’s continually deflated by the fact that no one can pronounce the Spanish word “lágrimas” correctly. (It’s got an accent mark for a reason.)
While the first half of the film is essentially a theme park remake of The African Queen, peppered with enough inside references to keep fans from walking out, the second half is a disappointing retread of the Pirates movies. Édgar Ramirez and his crew of conquistadors seem airlifted from the disparate ghost zombie crews of Hector Barbossa, Davy Jones, and Armando Salazar. Some of these phantasms are merged with plant life, others with insects or snakes, to the point where they may as well be leftover CGI creations that weren’t used in the final cuts of the Pirates films. I don’t know quite how you make a narrative film out of a plotless ride like Jungle Cruise – perhaps focusing more on the Jungle Navigation Co. or on Albert Awol (if you know, you know) – but I don’t think that cribbing the successful Pirates formula is the most satisfying way to go.
If the plot feels like it’s grafted together from impressions of its predecessors, the cast certainly all feel like they’re starring in different movies. Johnson is somewhat slick but never quite breaks free of his own star persona; if he’d committed to the Bogart of it all, or embraced the hammy humor, it could have been a breakout franchise performer like Johnny Depp’s impossibly popular Captain Jack Sparrow. Blunt too seems bored by most of the film, trying not to overdo the stuffy bluster but never quite landing anywhere. Then there are the three strangest performances in the film – Jack Whitehall as Lily’s brother, Jesse Plemons as Prince Joachim of Prussia (a real person, mind you), and Paul Giamatti as a dock owner who seems to have wandered in from a Saturday Night Live skit. Whitehall plays MacGregor extremely broadly, accessing a Forrest Gump level of caricature, even as the film only winks and nods in the direction of his sexuality. Plemons is clearly having arch fun as a Germanic villain, but he’s so transcendently unreal that one loses focus on the film every time he appears. (This performance was but an appetizer for the sheer historical stupidity on display later that year in The King’s Man.)
Then there’s Paul Giamatti, who seems to understand how silly the film is and so brings the right level of ham to his performance. Yet no one else in the film is operating at his level, which makes him look more like a cartoon character than the computer-generated jaguar that prowls around the film. Particularly as a gifted character performer in the vein of, say, the Universal monster films, Giamatti shines a light on just how incongruous Jungle Cruise manages to be, a collection of parts and bits from five different writers who never seem to be on the same page. Indeed, just about the only thing in the movie that works is a mid-film twist that I genuinely did not see coming, yet this shift in the plot ends up veering the film into another strange and unexpected direction. Perhaps Jungle Cruise is like the Amazon River itself, swirling and winding in unpredictable ways, with too many voices arguing over how best to navigate it.
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