Devon's Deep Take: Jungle Cruise (2021)
---SPOILERS--- this is only a step above a cut-and-paste Disney fantasy adventure flick, but I will give them credit for trying to improve on elements of their narrative decision-making.
BIO FROM IMDB: 1916. Dreaming about saving countless lives and having another adventure, the feisty English feminist and doctor of botany, Dr. Lily Houghton, embarks on a peril-laden mission to change the world. Along with her fashionable brother, MacGregor, Dr. Houghton enlists the help of the arrogant, wisecracking riverboat skipper, Capt. Frank Wolff, to guide them through the serpentine Amazon River in his swift wooden boat, La Quila.
Unless y’all were living under a rock during 2021—which some were and that’s fine—you no doubt saw one of the millions of adverts for Jungle Cruise. Anyone who knows me knows I hate these over-blown hype trains for every movie a studio doesn’t want to lose money on, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t loath to watch the damn thing in the end. Huge amount of money spent on this flick, approximately 200 million, and much of that went to the pre-release promotional campaigns; you are spared from my rant on this subject today.
For all those dollars spent—a $200 million budget— you expect something of an overblown return, but the projected gross worldwide is only a few million more. To my surprise though, for all the money that went into this project it was surprisingly subtle in tone, which I liked. The plot has all the same trappings we have come to expect from an unanimated Disney adventure: the charismatic lead, the funny side characters, etc. Disney has the resources and talent pool to knock these movies out of the park, but they also have the most rigorous studio oversight issues that cripple their end products. That’s why I was surprised that I enjoyed Jungle Cruise as much as I did. The performances, cinematography, and light tone were all things I expected going in—what I did not expect was to see some of laudable choices. I really liked decisions they made with the protagonist characters in this! MacGregor, Dr. Houghton’s “fashionable” brother, comes out to the Rock as gay in the second act; this is progress. Even five years ago or less, MacGregor’s mannerisms would have been gay-coded—the actor would have portrayed the same character, but instead of just acknowledging that and moving on, the angle would more likely have been, “I struggle with masculinity and scoring chicks because my character is weak and has no courage, and once I do ‘x’ I’ll instantly pick up a love interest and appear to have earned my masculinity as a character. I was always masculine but it came across like I was gay or something!” Obviously I don’t have to explain how MacGregor is progress; it’s not all the way there, but it has been worse and I appreciate the effort. Maybe next time don’t make that identity even have to pop up in the words—show don’t tell?
The weakest part of the film was the writing, which predictably started at whimsical adventure before morphing into multiple tracks trying to re-converge to one final crescendo. My primary concern was the antagonistic forces in the Prince and the cursed conquistadors. My spoiler warning likely turned off anyone interested in a fresh watch, so I’ll explain how my least favorite part of the entire film is when they make the Rock one of the immortal conquistadors. I peg this as a studio decision, possibly to give the wisecracking captain more connection to what I’m guessing were the story’s original villains. ‘Surely’, they thought, ‘people would not connect as much with the Rock if he was a simple river superman. We must make him one of them or the conquistadors become like Pirates of the Caribbean’—they come dreadfully close to that. The writers realized too far into the process that their conquistadors were very theme park ride, so they decided to include a deeper plot narrative that involves the lead conquistador having an ill daughter in 16th century Spain, and healing her is his character’s entire motivation for searching for the legendary flower petals in the New World. Not only that, but the Rock’s father was a mercenary hired by the lead conquistador which somehow made the Rock super chill with the main antagonist until the Rock betrays him in the end. Damn, they really do shoehorn the Rock in, not only as one of the original conquistadors, but as the de factor brother of the lead man? How crazy is it that the Rock was a conquistador in this narrative, but the only thing that differentiates him from the rest of his Spanish friends is his…conscience? And if the only motivation of the cursed conquistadors is to drop the curse, why do they perceive the Rock as a traitor? Even if the Rock hadn’t saved the life of the chief’s daughter and the conquistadors had found the tree, they still would not have known how to make the petals bloom to save the daughter. Oh yeah, wasn’t there a sick daughter in the mix somewhere? Is that still the lead antagonist’s motivation, or was that ever really important beyond the prologue?
This is where people start to hate me, but the entire narrative gets so clunky once we learn the Rock is immortal. Suddenly, not only does the narrative have to slip him in as a conquistador, but also has to answer for his entire existence for 400 years up until the Edwardian setting for the film. The writers try to address these curve balls—the Rock is connected to the conquistadors, the Rock built the town in the first town scene, the Rock charted the entire Amazon River basin. Now the hammer—what makes the Rock better than the other murderous conquistadors cursed by the local tribal chief centuries before (it wasn’t going to the Americas that earned the Spanish their cursed reputation)? More simple—how is the Rock, whose character is presented as a poor tour ship scammer, going to build an entire town in Brazil and still end up being some poor tug-boat captain—didn’t this asshole build the town bank? I won’t even go into the fact that slavery was legal in Brazil until after the US Civil War, and I won’t mention how the Rock’s town probably would have been a routing station for slaves heading for plantation work further inland—I won’t mention that. The biggest sin in the third act are the conflicting antagonists. Prince Joachim is set to win the flower using the Rock and Dr. Houghton to make the tree bloom when they are accosted by the conquistadors heading to the film’s climax. Prince Joachim is fun, but I don’t know what his purpose is, because the conquistador storyline tracks a supposed centuries-long blood feud between immortally cursed Spaniards and Joachim wears a shiny uniform. Honestly, he receives so little character investment, he might as well have not been included at all. The studio probably felt the conquistadors alone would make the movie too historic, maybe boring—so they injected a contemporary caricature into the mix as a red herring? The outright cartoon nature of Joachim makes him the worst character, which is unfortunate because the actor was giving his all with almost no character to attach to whatsoever.
I know it’s a kids movie, but that is no excuse; kids are actually getting smarter than most adults. As a kid, I’d respect a story that doesn’t cut corners to try to justify being “cool”, or however they want to justify their creative decisions in the film’s composition. I dislike when Disney does this—just because you add more complexity to a plot (or character, for that matter) does not mean the depth increases reactively. Another example of this is Maleficent, where Disney asks Angelina Jolie to invert the fairytale villain into a likeable protagonist anti-hero; inversion is one thing, but that film does a sloppy job of role reversal that leaves the viewer unsure of what anyone’s role in the narrative is beyond the big bad and the tortured protagonist (essentially a marvel film plot). Jungle Cruise has a two-part problem; the first issue is the inclusion of multiple antagonist characters and that is then compounded by a fast wrap-up in at the end, leaving many questions unanswered. Fast and loose—again I understand this is Disney, but the progressive parts of the film I like do contrast against the more tired regularities of the Disney adventure plot like a single pothole on an otherwise decent stretch of road.
Jungle Cruise is the kind of film you should watch like you drive a nice car down an empty backroad, don’t drive alone and don’t look too close at the scenery going by—otherwise you may realize you are on the Scenic Drive ride at Disney World. What I liked most about the film was the meme ability they put into it. All of the Rock’s lines are okay, but the more abstract bits (the tiger, small moments in dialogue) really pulled a lot of laughs out of me—a lot of that is acting and direction, not writing. I was happy to see that the whole tone of the film wasn’t designed to hold the attention of children since that kills every other animated film before it even hits theatres. Put simply, that strategy will make money in the kid market usually, but any good bits might be altered to allow for all the checklist items from the studio. This brings down any film’s integrity, but not entirely for Jungle Cruise. Ironically, the subtle tone throughout the movie pairs well with omitting some of the more outwardly-childish bits. What give the film 3/5 stars for me, instead of the 4/5 everyone else will offer, has to be the dedication the film has to making the adventure appear fun over setting up a solid narrative. The narrative creates motivations for the characters, and if the motivations are hazy it can be impossible for the viewer to determine what is happening. When the Rock became immortal, I officially didn’t know what anyone was in the story for anymore since they did not adequately write him out of the conquistadors group. Still, I’d say it isn’t bad for a live-action Disney adventure film starring Dwayne Johnson.