Jungle Cruise is Disney trying to make ITS dreams come true. Always ready and able to make as many dollars as possible, they continue to mine anything and everything they own and remix it to convince people it’s something different, using usually flashy means to disguise the emptiness at the core of the sale. Well, Emily Blunt and the Rock are pretty flashy, and do their damdest to sell Disney’s latest ride turned movie, mostly winning you over along the way.
We’re in 1916 London. While her brother MacGregor (Jack Whitehall) gives a speech to a crusty old group of explorers, Lily Houghton (Emily Blunt) is upstairs searching their archives for a clue to the Tears of the Moon, a tree with supposed magical healing powers in the Amazon. Also searching for the tree is Joachim (Jesse Plemons) a German U-Boat captain desiring supernatural support to help the Germans win The Great War. Joachim chases the Houghtons down to Brazil, where Lily enlists Frank (Dwayne Johnson), a local captain, to help her navigate the tributaries to help try to heal the planet, despite the rumors about Aguirre (Edgar Ramirez), a 16th century conquistador, still searching and protecting the Amazon in hopes to find the treasure himself.
Disney really didn’t feel like creating something new here at all. I counted several famous movies Jungle Cruise is openly stealing from to tell its story. The main film the 2021 movie is straight up plagiarizing is The African Queen, about a prickly couple falling in love riding a boat during German occupied rivers. I think Jungle Cruise is 85% the same plot as African Queen, but with a CGI jaguar and Jack Whitehall (no digs on them, they make the movie a lot of fun). How do they handle the ride inspiration? Supernaturalize everything like Pirates of the Caribbean! Spielberg lent Jesse Plemons’s Joachim and South American Artifacts from Raiders of the Lost Ark; heck, the writers couldn’t even come up with a new conquistador name, settling for Aguirre, which Werner Herzog better have gotten royalties for. During story brainstorming sessions, one of the writers must have just been browsing the Criterion Channel and just stitched together something on the fly the minute they heard Blunt and Johnson were the leads.
But even though Jaume Collet-Serra’s movie would never be a movie with a single ounce of originality, they’re plagiarizing some of the greatest movies of all time, meaning that the end result at least should have a high floor. It helps a lot that Collet-Sera has Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson leading their movie. The best parts of the film are when those two are dressing down each other while attracting each other at the same time, being the Disney and family movie vets that Blunt and Johnson are. The action pieces early on are really fun Austin Powers situations, with Blunt finding ways to hide in funny ways or amusingly evade capture, and Johnson taking his clients on a fake Jungle Cruise self-awarely mocking the Disney ride inspiration. Jack Whitehall, the CGI leopard Proxima, and Jesse Plemons give their best with fun spins on the uptight Brit, the adorable animal companion, and the coldly logical powerdrunk German respectively. The supernatural elements, coincidentally the most modern, work the least because they’re (smartly) left underexplored.
But hey, as far as family fare goes, you could do a lot worse than Jungle Cruise. With winning leads, a pastiche of famous movie stories/plots, and animals everywhere, the movie probably is more fun and exciting than it has any right to be. I will say though, when did family films feature a few deaths? Even though they’re bloodless, seems a little dark for a 7 year old to watch a man get stabbed…or is it me?