Jungle Cruise (Collet-Serra)
Jungle Cruise glides along for about an hour, propelled by the charms of Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt. Their charisma is seemingly without limit, and for just a moment mid-film, I teetered on the edge of hope that the whole enterprise, as ridiculous as it is, might just work.
It never goes over a cliff or a waterfall, but once it starts down the rapids it gets louder and longer and more frenetic. Big movies today — and are there any other kind? — don’t appear to know the difference between speed and momentum, pace and persistence. This one is over two hours long, and it is hard for me to express just how difficult and dubious a feat it is to give me Johnson and Blunt and leave me wanting…less.
The story is a serviceably silly mash-up of Pirates of the Caribbean and Raiders of the Lost Ark. As long as it embraces (or even just accepts) its “B” movie settings and set up, it is fine. Once it becomes a special-effects showcase that must justify its budget, it becomes generic, indistinguishable from the other links in the endless chain of live-action comic book movies and live-action versions of animated movies. Blunt (Lily) and Johnson (Frank) are each looking for a magical maguffin flower petal that keeps you alive if you don’t want to be dead or lets you die if you don’t want to live or . . . something. She hires him because he is a boat captain who allegedly knows the way. He accepts her because he supposedly needs to keep Paul Giamatti from foreclosing on his boat. Some zombie conquistadors show up with faces made of bees and snakes.
In my corner of the Internet echo chamber, everyone has been stressing for over a year now about when enough people will return to movie theaters that studios will feel comfortable releasing movies again. Tenet, then Wonder Woman, then Black Widow were all supposed to save the theaters by making some theatrical experience essential. But perhaps (he says the scary part out loud) the pandemic just proved to a lot of people that they didn’t necessarily miss the theater experience. I am not sure how a bunch of teenagers on dates surfing their phones and a tub of $15 popcorn would have transformed this movie from a C-ticket to an A-ticket. (Yes, I remember when Disney rides had tickets.) Maybe, though, if Dune is very good, we will all remember that the C-ticket rides were about what you could get into when the line for the A-ticket attraction was too long.
