Under normal circumstances, I would definitely not take on the assignment of reviewing Jungle Cruise.
It is pretty much a total confluence of things about modern Hollywood that I’m absolutely exhausted by. Disney and their bland house style (the days of them greenlighting insane swings like The Lone Ranger or John Carter are long gone), lazy CGI-laden filmmaking that blunts the impact of any and all action, and — maybe worst of all — the dreaded branding and screen persona of one Dwayne Johnson. A screen presence who is now more sentient Instagram post than man, and who less “acts” in films now and more simply shucks and winks his way through them, all but turning to the camera to promote his tequila brand or Under Armour or whatever else he’s got his hooks in at the moment. And in the process cranks out one forgettable, completely soulless blockbuster after another (Rampage, Skyscraper and Hobbs & Shaw being the most notable recent offenders in this regard).
But… unlike Hobbs & Shaw, Rampage and Skyscraper, Jungle Cruise was not directed by an execrable hack1. It was directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. And as much as I loathe Disney and the Rock, I love his work. Hell, I wrote a piece for Lewton Bus a few years ago outlining why I love his work, and I stand by it. For the last decade and a half, he’s been one of the last vanguards of the mid-budget studio genre picture. He’s a director with outstanding formal skill and a sense of fun, whose goal is to liven up high concept genre scripts with real craft, an earnest embrace of relishing the ridiculous, and a willingness to take wild narrative and tonal swings that most directors working in this sphere would not dare. From the delirious, deranged intensity of Orphan, to the glorious pressure-cooker cheese of his Liam Neeson actioners (Non-Stop and The Commuter being the best of those), to the delightfully nasty creature feature thrills of The Shallows, he’s spent much of his career making the kind of films that are becoming increasingly scarce in Hollywood, and doing them better than almost anyone else.
Naturally, I was concerned about him “graduating” to big budget features, particularly an adaptation of a theme park ride at Disney produced by the aforementioned Rock. But… I held out hope that there would at least be some trace of the mid-budget nasty thriller guy in there. And while there are definitely a few moments where I can feel Collet-Serra’s thumbprint, overall it feels like he could not quite overcome the challenges being thrown at him by the nature of modern studio filmmaking on this one. You can feel his earnestly silly tone at the edges of this, of the version of the movie he’d want to make, and it’s being absolutely, completely stifled by the corporate mandate being foisted upon him. It can’t fully be earnest because the Rock is here, and goddamnit the Rock is gonna make some ironic quips that pander to his audience. It can’t exercise exquisite formal control, jump styles and textures and play with the editing to suit the scene at hand, because that would conflict with Disney’s boring, flat, green-screened digital modern house aesthetic where everything is filmed in a flat, televisual style in a parking lot in Georgia in front of green screens.
That last point is especially damning, because especially in this case the non-tactility of this film is seriously damaging. You can see the kind of film the filmmakers and producers wanted this to be; a rip-roaring thrill ride adventure in the spirit of the movies that were all the rage in the studio system in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Your Mummys and your Pirates of the Caribbeans. And Jungle Cruise copies their basic plot approach too. In lieu of a synopsis I’ll just tell you it’s about characters who come together to find a magic McGuffin thing with a supernatural curse and other, villainous parties want it, etc etc. But this movie gravely fails where those succeeded in that for all of their CGI touchups (and extremely poor ones, in the case of The Mummy), those films had tactility. They had enormous sets. In The Mummy they built an actual City of the Dead set in the Moroccan desert. Those movies had real stunts and action that was cut with care and finesse. Jungle Cruise has none of that. It’s the modern Disney aesthetic of bland, over-lit coverage, action that is cut to ribbons, CGI sequences that were clearly previzzed before a director was ever hired (and look like it), and a fully green-screened environment that never once feels fully real or tangible. Now, there were parts where I felt like this was an intentional choice by Collet-Serra, trying to work with the limitations placed on him by leaning into the artifice, attempting to approximate the actual feel of the theme park ride itself, even. There’s one cleverly edited sequence early in the film that totally feels like a piss-take of the actual experience of an amusement park, but just as often it just feels flat and unconvincing.
And another thing that The Mummy and Pirates of the Caribbean had? Actual, like, teeth. There were moments in those films that fully lunged into a horror atmosphere, tonally. Moments that actually aimed to be scary (in a kiddie sort of way, but still), that made it feel all the more thrilling when our heroes managed to win the day. And if you let Collet-Serra do his thing, he would absolutely be capable of delivering on those moments. Imagine a sort of hybrid of his horror work with his action work. Unfortunately, he was defeated by the constraints here, as no moment is ever allowed to properly go full horror, and the artifice and relentlessly sunny Disney disposition prevents the supernatural elements from ever fully landing in the way that, say, Davy Jones or the scarab kill in The Mummy did.
Pirates and The Mummy often thrived on their cast chemistry, as well. The latter in particular working wonders with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. Well… with Jungle Cruise they get like 30% of the way there. Emily Blunt heroically attempts to carry this film on her back, and if any moments in this work from the heroes’ perspective it’s because of her. Jesse Plemons is also a delight as an omega ham German villain, basically playing a parody of a Peter Lorre character. Everyone else… well… lol. The Rock is not only as non-acting as ever, he’s also an actively horrible choice for this part. He’s basically playing a jacked-up pastiche of Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, and uhh… he is not Bogie. There are plenty of actors who could do the earnest, hard edge that the character probably calls for, but the Rock can’t have a hard edge. That’d hurt his image. So instead, he makes loads of dad jokes, winks constantly, and never once feels believable as either who his character presents himself as or who he’s eventually revealed to be. Yes there is a reveal. And while it doesn’t quite work, it’s also the only thing in the movie that remotely feels like a real story choice, much less one Collet-Serra himself would have made. He has no chemistry with Blunt because he basically can’t have chemistry with anyone at this point. As for everyone else, Jack Whitehall is basically playing an incredibly irritating version of John Hannah from The Mummy, and the less said about him, the better. Disney, of course, tries to pat itself on the back for heavily alluding to his character being gay, which will never ever be enough as long as they can’t just come out and outright embrace that, because it’d hurt their bottom line. Paul Giamatti turns up for a few minutes and his hamming is fun, but he’s gone from the film before he can leave much of an impact.
All this isn’t to say it was completely unwatchable. Like I alluded to earlier, there are a few brief flashes of Collet-Serra’s sensibility that leak through. A short sequence with a WWI-era film camera in black and white represents the only significant stylistic divergence in the film, along with a couple moments of slow-mo, some snappily edited bits and some wild plot turns feel like him trying to put his stamp on the material. And his earnest tone couldn’t quite be completely quelled, either. You can feel him clashing against the Rock’s branding at key moments, and being a modern Disney movie, it’s never really quite painful to sit through, either. It feels like a movie made for its eventual arrival on Disney+. Something you stumble on, put on out of boredom, and then end up watching all the way through due to a lack of anything better to do. Basically just like Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin (another director with a unique style, trying and failing to fit within this framework), it just feels arbitrary and inconsequential. Like something you don’t fully despise in the moment but that also leaves your brain the minute it’s over. It’s not quite as bad as the other Rock films I mentioned earlier, but it also really isn’t much better. It’s just another run-of-the-mill, relentlessly blueprinted, ultimately forgettable entry for both The Rock and Disney. One that feels damning in this case because you know the people in charge can do better.
