Jungle Cruise: Dwayne Johnson Gives his All to Keep a Leaky Theme-Park Ride Afloat

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-minus

There may be nobody on the Hollywood casting speed-dial capable of doing the heavy lifting on a whole lot of nothing like Dwayne Johnson.

In Jungle Cruise, the latest attempt by Disney to capitalize on its classic theme park rides (which have given us hits like Pirates of the Caribbean and flops like The Haunted Mansion), Johnson plays guitar, rattles off interminable streams of the world’s worst puns and wrestles a jaguar in a South American cantina.

Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt travel the Amazon in the very theme park-y Jungle Cruise.

None of this changes the fact that you’re looking at a family  “adventure” story that is derivative of things that were already derivative the first time around. Set during World War I, it matches up a determined and stubborn academic with a bent for ancient cultures (Emily Blunt) and her nervous dandy of a brother (Jack Whitehall) with a cynical boat captain (Johnson) charged with taking them to a dangerous place down the Amazon.

The prize: a mythical but maybe real supernatural tree called Tears of the Moon, whose petals can reputedly cure all disease and injury – a handy thing to have on the battlefield.

Following them: a German submarine, captained by the villainous Prince Joachim (an improbable Jesse Plemons, who apparently can play anything). Prince Joachim has similar designs on the healing tree, with the grandiose notion that its discovery will make him the most powerful man in Germany.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

(Just as an aside, I don’t think Kaiser Wilhelm was as preoccupied as Hitler with the idea of winning the war with a magical MacGuffin).

Already, we’re looking at Raiders of the Lost Ark, Romancing the Stone, the Brendan Fraser/Rachel Weisz version of The Mummy (right down to the whinging brother), and way back in the gene pool, The African Queen.

Which is fine for a while. A copy of something entertaining can entertain as well. The film from director Jaume Collet-Serra even has a winking acknowledgement of its origins, as we discover that Frank Wolff, the captain, has set up the journey to be something of a theme park ride in its own right, complete with fake hippos that somehow ended up in the wrong continent, and angry Native “cannibals” who are in on Frank’s schtick.

And Blunt’s pre-modern feminist Lily (the running gag about a woman wearing pants gets a little tired), gets to be the proactive one more often than not, acrobatically running for her life to keep the plot moving in separate scenes from London to the Amazon.

So, for the first two acts at least, Jungle Cruise is reasonably good fodder for a family outing, very much a theme park ride of the cinematic kind. I feel sorry for whoever had to write the last act, however, which attempts to resolve a whole lot of mysticism with zombie conquistadors, sentient snakes and a “reveal” about a main character that makes absolutely no sense. This is where you lose the kids in a movie that’s a half-hour longer than it needed to be.

Jungle Cruise. Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. Starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt and Jesse Plemons. Now in theatres and available with Premier Access on Disney+.