Jungle Cruise

Under normal circumstances, Jungle Cruise would probably be a pretty solid B-Feature.  But, given some of the blockbusters I have had to sit through this summer, maybe I liked it a bit more than I expected.  My expectations were not exactly sky high, mind you.  But, you want a rip-roaring, swashbuckling adventure in the style of Indiana Jones or 1999's The Mummy, and don't mind a heavy serving of cheese?  You might find yourself in the same spot I did while watching it.

I will be the first to admit that I have a soft spot for adventure movies like this, and this is a cheerful and buoyant example of it.  There is a part of me that still loves movies built around secret tombs, ancient legends set around magical healing trees in the South American jungle, and at the center of it all, a charming and bickering couple, usually a fast-talking rogue and a woman with a desire for adventure, and an even stronger desire to prove all the boys wrong.  Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt fill the roles of the rogue and the woman, respectively, and they make the most out of their individual turns.  Yes, they're playing predetermined characters here.  We know that he's going to try to cheat or swindle her several times, she's not going to stand for it, there will be much arguing and maybe she'll throw a punch or two in his face (some accidental, some not), and sooner or later, they'll realize that they care a lot for each other.  But, sometimes you just stick with what works, and they have the chemistry to pull it off.  

The action is set in 1916, which finds our heroine Lily (Blunt) as an adventurous sort trying to stand out in a man's world.  When she wants to arrange an expedition to South America in order to follow a map that could lead to a mystical tree whose healing properties could be used to heal and save countless lives, she has to have her snooty brother MacGregor (Jack Whitehall) talk to the explorer's council in order to try to get it off the ground, as the stuffy council members won't even listen to her.  She's come across an arrowhead that she thinks can help lead her to the tree, but even with her brother's help, the council won't bite.  At this same time, she learns that a pompous German Prince named Joachim (Jesse Plemons) is also seeking the tree for his own more selfish means, and sets about trying to take what Lily has by force.  This leads to the first of many broad action scenes filled with narrow escapes and much dangling from precarious ledges, cliffs and windowsills featured in the film.  At least the movie doesn't take long to tell you where it stands, and I admit, my heart kind of got excited when I realized what director Jaume Collet-Serra (The Shallows) was going for.

After they escape, Lily and MacGregor head for the Amazon River on their own to seek a boat and a guide who can lead them through the jungle.  In steps Frank (Johnson), a riverboat Captain who takes gullible tourists on staged tours through the most "dangerous" parts of the jungle.  He owes a great deal of money to a powerful harbor master (Paul Giamatti), so Frank cons his way into getting Lily to agree to take him on her voyage.  With Joachim constantly pursuing them in his personal submarine, our three heroes will brave the different threats of the jungle, and uncover the secrets of an ancient jungle curse that was set some 400 years ago, and concerns some ancient explorers who were seeking the same tree everyone else is.

You have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy a movie like Jungle Cruise, and after the non-stop idiocy of F9 or the overly chaotic nothingness of Space Jam: A New Legacy, it felt good to be watching an old fashioned, cheesy throwback like this.  Heck, I almost wanted to stand up and applaud when I noticed the movie was using physical sets, and contained stunts and action scenes that actually looked like they were being performed by actual human beings. (Do you have the sense that the movies this summer have been a bit too artificial?) The cast are also more than capable of selling this material.  Johnson has always been a charming leading man, and he brings to that quality a more roguish quality that is not so much dangerous, but more of a smart aleck with a love for corny jokes.  Blunt, meanwhile, expertly handles the role of the woman who thinks she can handle anything, but isn't expecting to fall for the guy she initially can't stand.  Like I said, we've seen these types a dozen times, but both stars bring enough here that I didn't mind seeing them again.

In fact, it's only when the movie is being artificial that it failed to work on me, and that concerns the CG.  It's pretty bad here, and kind of distracts from the old adventure movie vibe the movie is going for, and mostly achieves.  Johnson has a jungle cat living on his ship, and it's so blatantly a special effect, it pulled me out every time it showed up on screen.  Given the cat never gets any big scene or truly contributes to anything, the movie would have been better off without Johnson's CG sidekick.  Luckily, this does not happen enough to be an overall determent to the film.  It's just an annoyance.  I was so in love with the lavish jungle and ruin sets, I wanted everything else to get the same level of attention to detail.

Outside of the odd effect mishap, Jungle Cruise is the kind of summer entertainment I crave sometimes.  It may be made almost completely out of cliches and worn material from better movies, but it knows how to use those elements, and the cast is able to bring a fresh enough spin to it.  It also simply has an innocence that has been missing from a lot of the other big movies we've gotten so far this year.  You go to a movie like this to see the two lead stars get into a lot of dangerous and improbable adventures while they slowly fall in love, and it provides this simple desire with more skill than you might expect. 

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