To Be Blunt, It’s Pants
While Black Widow and her lawyers prep for court, Jungle Cruise introduces us to a plucky new Disney heroine: Dr. Lily Houghton, played by Emily Blunt, one of the best actresses working today. Lily is the type of doctor who picks locks and chloroforms men who get in her way. She also performs dancing ladder stunts and is perfectly capable of kicking and punching, even headbutting, her own way out of danger.
At one point, the movie has her jump through the hoops of an attempted kidnapping and escape. It happens in a Brazilian port instead of a Cairo marketplace and her would-be abductors stick her in a birdcage instead of a basket. However, there are monkeys on the loose and other shades of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The difference is that Lily is now the one wearing the hero’s hat: she uses it to subdue an assailant before donning it again in a dramatic fashion, as if to show she is every bit as capable as Indiana Jones. The men are all amazed that she wears pants and one of them even decides to make that her nickname. He alternates between calling her “Lady” and “Pants,” which is weird because she’s British and “pants” is British slang for “rubbish.”
Her brother, meanwhile, is Disney’s first major gay character, which comes across when he says that he couldn’t marry a woman, any woman, because his “interests lie elsewhere.” The movie gives a well-meaning toast to that, and who knows, that birdcage could even be a subtle invocation of The Birdcage. Blunt is no stranger to live-action Disney flicks, having played the titular nanny in Mary Poppins Returns. Two years ago, I watched that movie on a plane to Walt Disney World and it struck me as inoffensive but somewhat dull and forgettable, especially in terms of music (that being a highlight of the original 1964 Mary Poppins film, starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke). You could say the same thing about Jungle Cruise but for its Metallica moments. The movie gets by on the charm of its cast, and to audiences looking for an enjoyable time-waster, the morphine drip of entertainment may be enough to override all other concerns. Jesse Plemons and Paul Giamatti work their foreign accents (German and Italian, respectively) and we’re reminded that this is a profoundly Eurocentric adventure through South America. Birds squawk “Frank owes me money,” and someone somewhere in Brazil thinks, “Dammit, Hollywood owes us better representation.”
Maybe we all think of Johannsson again and how Disney allegedly owes her money? Or not. Whatever the case, Jungle Cruise is, like the ghosts of Godzillas past, a chip off the old blockbuster. Nothing is egregiously bad, but boredom sets in around the halfway mark as the movie shows its full hand and you realize that includes an undying Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (who did play the Scorpion King and who does come face-to-face with a scorpion on the floor of a tavern here).
‘Jungle Cruise’ Spoiler Review: Steamboat Disney Plots A Familiar Course Down The Blockbuster River
By Joshua Meyer/Aug. 2, 2021 7:38 am EST
“Nothing Else Matters”
Yes, even your favorite heavy metal power ballad now falls under Disney’s cultural hegemony. This might not bother anyone since many of the teen headbangers who grew up listening to Metallica are probably now middle-aged parents, looking for a little family-friendly entertainment to keep their kids occupied.
Like all things in Disney’s shadow, the music soon fades to the background, anyway, as Jack Whitehall’s character, MacGregor, begins his voiceover, delivering an immediate info dump about the legend of the Tears of the Moon. This is going to be one of those movies where there’s a lot of mythological backstory that needs to be shown and told at the same time.
“A single petal from the great Tree,” MacGregor’s voice confides, “could cure any illness or break any curse.”
Too many names? Buckle up for some more, Mouseketeers, because yes, this is also one of those movies where the screenplay and story are credited to five different people: Michael Green and Glen Ficarra & John Requa and John Norville & Josh Goldstein. You won’t see their names or anyone else’s until the closing credits because even after the film’s 15-minute intro, when the title Jungle Cruise finally appears onscreen, it’s only prefaced with the words, “Disney Presents.”
Disney’s response led to accusations of a “gendered character attack” on Johansson, one of only two women to topline a (long overdue) solo film for Marvel Studios, a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios. For some, it may be tough to reconcile this with the image of daughters dressing up as Disney princesses like Cinderella or Marvel superheroines like Black Widow. Then again, should it really come as a surprise that, in the end, “nothing else matters” to a media conglomerate besides the financial bottom line?
Enter Through the Gift Shop
As alluded to in our non-spoiler review, pretty much any adult with two eyes is liable to be reminded of some other adventure film, including but not limited to the aforementioned Pirates of the Caribbean, or Disney’s other seafaring live-action success, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, or even a serious war movie like Apocalypse Now (since a stray German U-boat does come submarining in, blasting classical music from a gramophone instead of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” from a tape deck).
To say nothing of The African Queen, Romancing the Stone, or the Mummy franchise and its recycled group dynamic and Scorpion King actor. It leaves the overstimulated streaming viewer to wonder: were movies always this nakedly derivative or is it just that our awareness of their scavenged parts has grown more heightened in the Internet age?
Whichever the answer (probably the latter), there are some Easter eggs in Jungle Cruise that only theme park fanatics are likely to catch. It’s the kind of tentpole that makes men proudly display their Tiki mugs from the Trader Sam’s gift shop in Disneyland, even as their fellow YouTube reviewers give an unimpressed shrug and syllabize, “Oh.” Forget Banksy and Dismaland: this movie asks you to enter, not exit, through the gift shop.
Cannibalistic headhunters get gender-flipped and reworked as intelligent tribal leaders who only act the part of savages to fool tourists. There’s a mercenary quality to such storytelling decisions because they come packaged in a slick corporate product that signals progressive ideals while appealing to nostalgia for sorta racist ride characters.
Speaking as /Film’s former Theme Park Bits columnist, when I think of the Jungle Cruise ride, I think of animatronic animals, mostly because I’m used to riding it at Tokyo Disneyland and my Japanese isn’t good enough to understand the skipper’s running commentary. However, the ride also has the benefit of not being anchored to any one river. It’s set in a dream-world nexus between the rivers of Asia, Africa, and South America.
To Be Blunt, It’s Pants
While Black Widow and her lawyers prep for court, Jungle Cruise introduces us to a plucky new Disney heroine: Dr. Lily Houghton, played by Emily Blunt, one of the best actresses working today. Lily is the type of doctor who picks locks and chloroforms men who get in her way. She also performs dancing ladder stunts and is perfectly capable of kicking and punching, even headbutting, her own way out of danger.
At one point, the movie has her jump through the hoops of an attempted kidnapping and escape. It happens in a Brazilian port instead of a Cairo marketplace and her would-be abductors stick her in a birdcage instead of a basket. However, there are monkeys on the loose and other shades of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The difference is that Lily is now the one wearing the hero’s hat: she uses it to subdue an assailant before donning it again in a dramatic fashion, as if to show she is every bit as capable as Indiana Jones. The men are all amazed that she wears pants and one of them even decides to make that her nickname. He alternates between calling her “Lady” and “Pants,” which is weird because she’s British and “pants” is British slang for “rubbish.”
Her brother, meanwhile, is Disney’s first major gay character, which comes across when he says that he couldn’t marry a woman, any woman, because his “interests lie elsewhere.” The movie gives a well-meaning toast to that, and who knows, that birdcage could even be a subtle invocation of The Birdcage. Blunt is no stranger to live-action Disney flicks, having played the titular nanny in Mary Poppins Returns. Two years ago, I watched that movie on a plane to Walt Disney World and it struck me as inoffensive but somewhat dull and forgettable, especially in terms of music (that being a highlight of the original 1964 Mary Poppins film, starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke). You could say the same thing about Jungle Cruise but for its Metallica moments. The movie gets by on the charm of its cast, and to audiences looking for an enjoyable time-waster, the morphine drip of entertainment may be enough to override all other concerns. Jesse Plemons and Paul Giamatti work their foreign accents (German and Italian, respectively) and we’re reminded that this is a profoundly Eurocentric adventure through South America. Birds squawk “Frank owes me money,” and someone somewhere in Brazil thinks, “Dammit, Hollywood owes us better representation.”
Maybe we all think of Johannsson again and how Disney allegedly owes her money? Or not. Whatever the case, Jungle Cruise is, like the ghosts of Godzillas past, a chip off the old blockbuster. Nothing is egregiously bad, but boredom sets in around the halfway mark as the movie shows its full hand and you realize that includes an undying Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (who did play the Scorpion King and who does come face-to-face with a scorpion on the floor of a tavern here).
At one point, the movie has her jump through the hoops of an attempted kidnapping and escape. It happens in a Brazilian port instead of a Cairo marketplace and her would-be abductors stick her in a birdcage instead of a basket. However, there are monkeys on the loose and other shades of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The difference is that Lily is now the one wearing the hero’s hat: she uses it to subdue an assailant before donning it again in a dramatic fashion, as if to show she is every bit as capable as Indiana Jones. The men are all amazed that she wears pants and one of them even decides to make that her nickname. He alternates between calling her “Lady” and “Pants,” which is weird because she’s British and “pants” is British slang for “rubbish.”
Her brother, meanwhile, is Disney’s first major gay character, which comes across when he says that he couldn’t marry a woman, any woman, because his “interests lie elsewhere.” The movie gives a well-meaning toast to that, and who knows, that birdcage could even be a subtle invocation of The Birdcage.
Blunt is no stranger to live-action Disney flicks, having played the titular nanny in Mary Poppins Returns. Two years ago, I watched that movie on a plane to Walt Disney World and it struck me as inoffensive but somewhat dull and forgettable, especially in terms of music (that being a highlight of the original 1964 Mary Poppins film, starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke).
You could say the same thing about Jungle Cruise but for its Metallica moments. The movie gets by on the charm of its cast, and to audiences looking for an enjoyable time-waster, the morphine drip of entertainment may be enough to override all other concerns.
Jesse Plemons and Paul Giamatti work their foreign accents (German and Italian, respectively) and we’re reminded that this is a profoundly Eurocentric adventure through South America. Birds squawk “Frank owes me money,” and someone somewhere in Brazil thinks, “Dammit, Hollywood owes us better representation.”
Maybe we all think of Johannsson again and how Disney allegedly owes her money? Or not. Whatever the case, Jungle Cruise is, like the ghosts of Godzillas past, a chip off the old blockbuster. Nothing is egregiously bad, but boredom sets in around the halfway mark as the movie shows its full hand and you realize that includes an undying Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (who did play the Scorpion King and who does come face-to-face with a scorpion on the floor of a tavern here).
This Rock is 400 Years Old
Newton’s version of “Nothing Else Matters” has a Spanish flavor to it, but that’s more than you could say for The Rock. Looking back over his filmography, I realize that I haven’t seen many of Johnson’s movies because they, like those of his self-appointed acting coach Vin Diesel, never held much enticement. My favorite role of his is that of Maui in Moana, where it’s just his voice singing, “You’re Welcome.”
Here, he’s believable and likable as Frank, the steamboat captain, but I didn’t buy him as a Francisco, the immortal cartographer. Is it wrong to want to see more of his simple human side, as opposed to his invincible superhuman side? It’s one thing to have the man make his entrance by swinging around on a jungle vine like Tarzan (when he could have just stepped down the ladder like a normal person). It’s another thing to have him withstand heart stabbings and later petrify but then come back to life. (The Rock, you see, becomes an actual rock.)
Some underwater mouth-to-mouth primes us for Frank’s big kiss with Lily at the end, but their romance also feels like a box that the factory-assembled movie needs to tick in order to be a four-quadrant release. We get a group hug with all three leads and the jaguar, then some slow-walking, then The Rock in period attire as a London gentleman. He looks about as out of place in that top hat as you would expect.
The curse is lifted and we’ve survived the raging river rapids. Looking back, the best part of the movie — this “onion of [digital] deceit,” to paraphrase the dialogue — was those precious few moments when it went silent inside the black-and-white frame of a “moving picture camera.” Having spent enough time on the backlot in Blackhall Studios (in Atlanta, Georgia, where much of the film was shot), I’d like to crawl inside that camera and live there, free of arrowheads and flower-petal MacGuffins. Sometimes, it’s good to go off the map.
