Jungle All the Way

If you've been to a Disney theme park, and you're anything like me, then you unironically think that the Jungle Cruise ride is one of the better ones in the park. I never rode the Pirates of the Caribbean ride before that was turned into a movie, but I had been on the Jungle Cruise. What would that mean to me for the Jungle Cruise movie, starring Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt?

Well, there's a lot less "ride" to work with there (not that Pirates offered much). Jungle Cruise is an endurance/appreciation test for lame jokes... and that's about it. In that respect, I suppose Jungle Cruise delivers. Though it does so by front-loading almost all of that in the first 10 minutes, paving the way for the rather uninspired archaeological adventure they've invented for the film.

This is a big dumb action movie. That's elevated to the degree that they went out and got two of the best actors you could possibly get for a big dumb action movie. Dwayne Johnson has made this his bread and butter over a box office record breaking career. And more people should remember how great Emily Blunt was in Edge of Tomorrow. Without these two, Jungle Cruise would be a much worse movie.

But it still isn't a very good one. For a big dumb action movie, there isn't really much in the way of exceptional, memorable action sequences here. A submarine chase that tears up most of a colonial Amazon settlement comes close, but the rest is too-typical gawk-at-the-greenscreen fare. The story holding these action sequences together isn't much to dig into either, a pastiche of supernatural gobbledigook that hopes to recapture the Pirates of the Caribbean movie magic. (I thought to myself, watching this, that it wasn't going to launch a franchise the way Pirates did. Little did I know that the sequel had already been greenlighted.)

There was an unexpected bit of LGBTQ representation here that felt like a small step forward for Disney -- which until now has generally included only a single shot or line of dialogue that can easily be lifted from a film. Here, we get a character for whom being gay is a pretty central element of his background. Discrimination he has faced is actually given a serious moment or two -- as opposed to the sexism toward Emily Blunt's character, which is played almost exclusively for laughs. Could they still cut around this character being gay for foreign markets? You bet. But this does feel like a better effort.

Ultimately, Jungle Cruise doesn't do enough wrong to be a bad movie. But even if your standards are "I just like The Rock" or "I just want some mindless fun," there are stronger movie choices than this. I give Jungle Cruise a C. I guess the source material was better?