Jungle Cruise control to a great first act and overall fun, but flawed film

There are many reasons why people could love or dislike Jungle Cruise. It stars Dwayne Johnson! It’s based on a theme park ride. It’s based on a theme park ride! Your negative reasons for liking it could easily be someone else’s reason for enjoying it. As a former WDW park employee, I can see many things to love about Jungle Cruise. The first act is jammed with subtle, meta winks to the audience as the film blurs between movie and self-realization that its premise is an audio-animatronic ride based on puns and adventure. That same period of the film is also wildly entertaining and will remind older movie fans of Raiders and Romancing the Stone.

As the film goes on, it will crib too much from those films, but more on that in a moment.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Jungle Cruise. It’s actually a very good film that audiences 11 and up will enjoy. Those viewers who are closer to middle school will enjoy the film much more than those who drove them to the theater, but it’s not an entirely lopsided experience.

The first 60% of the film is a very quickly-paced setup that introduces the Skipper (Dwayne Johnson), the scientist who wants to hire him (Emily Blunt), and her brother (Jack Whitehall). The action sequences in that part of the film are well executed and will keep middle school audiences looking forward to what happens next.

The supposed, big gay reveal, that happens with Whitehall’s character is much ado about nothing. He plays a man who brings 20 bags on a small boat, that can only accommodate one and is dressed as if he’s going to a fancy ball instead of the jungle. The character also speaks with a very faint lilt in his voice. You know that Disney included this plot point to be inclusive, but the heavy-handed and stereotypical manner in which it’s done is more insulting to gay people than the rainbow-colored welcome mat it was intended to be. Also, spoiler alert, if you’ve ever been to Walt Disney World it’s almost certain that your tour guide, emcee, ice-cream vendor or ticket taker were gay too.

Johnson and Blunt have great chemistry. Their verbal sparring is fun to watch and it’s obvious why the director allowed for some of their dialogue to be off-script. The two 11-year-old boys that I saw the film with absolutely loved it. They jokingly covered their eyes when the skeletons were about to be brought back to life and squirmed when the multitudes of CGI snakes were creeping out.

Older, shall I say, more discriminating moviegoers will enjoy Jungle Cruise but may tire of some of its devices. There are thousands of CGI snakes, yet nobody gets bitten. The finale has a staircase scene that’s remarkably similar to Raiders with Blunt filling in for Karen Allen. The skeletons who become somewhat humanoid are cool but are all too familiar to anyone who has seen Pirates of the Caribbean, the movie, not the ride.

Jungle Cruise is very entertaining, but the more distance that’s between you and the film, the more disposable it becomes. I think that part of that is due to the fact that the film’s supernatural villain is either too chaotic and not fully fleshed out from a character’s perspective. Another issue could be that moviegoers are getting more discriminating as to what they’ll pay money for. A movie that’s ‘entertaining’ in the spring of 2019 is one thing. A movie that was filmed in 2019, but is merely entertaining for some, -if you take it with a grain of salt, but sees it in the summer of 2021 is another matter.

The movie fan in me hopes that any decreased box office from a film will assist in lowering their costs. I do not believe that cheaper movies are necessarily better. Conversely, those films that cost almost $200 million dollars aren’t guaranteed to be great simply due to how much money is spent on them. I tell my kids that what others spend on their things has no bearing on how much I’m willing to spend on our things. Likewise, how much a person gets paid in a film is none of my business. They do their work and deserve to get paid appropriately.

However, just like the real world, if the company is going through problems due to one thing or another, it will impact how much they get paid for the project or the game. I say all of this because I found a soapbox under my table and that Jungle Cruise is loaded, far too loaded with shiny objects and CGI happenings. The best asset the movie has going for it is its human stars.

Heck, even Jewel of the Nile was entertaining, albeit a big step down from Romancing the Stone. Jungle Cruise is headed down the right river but got sidetracked by looking at future films, rather than sticking the landing with this movie. I suspect audiences will be game for more Jungle Cruise movies, given the film’s leads, but they’ll be less forgiving of a mushy story that overcompensates with CGI snakes.

Jungle Cruise is rated PG-13.