Has Disney run out of ideas? Well…not quite. It just feels that way much of the time. Case in point: why do we have movies based on theme park rides that may or may not have a story worth adapting? Disney did hit paydirt with the Pirates of the Caribbean series, financially if not critically over time. Still, the new Jungle Cruise did have two really good things going for it: Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson and Emily Blunt. Both have proven themselves separately in movies as charming and addable leads. Putting them together might bring some real fun to the screen.
Granted, it’s still based on a theme park ride, but here we are.
Dr. Lily Houghton (Blunt) has a lead on a possible map to the legendary Tears of the Moon, a mythical tree that supposedly has flowers that can cure any and all illnesses. Small problem: as a woman in 1916, Lily can’t get assistance for such things from the stuffy old men who run the exploration society that has the arrowhead that will, she believes, lead her to the tree. Her only help comes from her brother MacGregor (Jake Whitehall), and he actually isn’t very useful, preferring the softer life of the upperclass to running around in exotic locations. However, Lily does get the arrowhead and is soon on her way to Brazil to hire a skipper to take the two of them up the river. She eventually settles on Frank Wolff (Johnson), but he’s more of a con man than anything, arranging half-assed shows for gullible tourists while owing a lot of money to a local harbormaster (Paul Giamatti doing a cartoonish accent).
Of course, with the first World War raging, there are others who want to find the Tears of the Moon. That would include Jesse Plemons as real-world figure Prince Joachim, youngest son of Kaiser Wilhelm and a quarter of cursed conquistadors who need the flowers to release themselves from the curse. Who will find the Tears of the Moon first, if it even exists?
Now, for much of this movie, I honestly felt like it was trying to coast by just on the (admittedly impressive) charms of Johnson and Blunt. These are two of the most likable actors working today. As such, with the movie feeling very by-the-numbers in many ways, I did get the impression it was mostly trying to get by on Johnson and Blunt’s charms. For the first half of the movie, it seems intent on making Frank out to be a major fraud and little else. Lily, basically an early feminist who–GASP–wears pants, finds very little to like about him when so many things that are happening to the group is not what it seems to be, and Frank knows a lot more than he lets on in general. Around the halfway point, the movie does give us some backstory, and the conquistadors are rather cool in a movie where there is an obvious CGI jaguar running around.
But then something hit me. I expect a movie like this to set Frank and Lily up as a couple, but Lily spends so much of the movie not caring for or trusting Frank in the slightest that, when she does come around, it feels very sudden. Why does she change her mind? I can’t say that I know for certain. It doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. Those thoughts nagged at me, knocking me out of the movie with a blow to my suspension of disbelief, and we’re talking about a movie with cursed conquistadors and a magic tree. I mean, I do expect a romance to blossom between two characters like this–it would be more surprising and quite frankly welcome to me if that didn’t happen once in a while–but I expect there to be some build up on her part. Frank seems intrigued from the beginning, but she is a much different story. Stuff like that suggests at best a pacing problem for what it otherwise an essentially harmless bit of fluff.
Grade: C+
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