Jungle Cruise — now on Disney+’s Premier Access tier — is I guess what passes for original content from Disney these days. Those of …
Jungle Cruise — now on Disney+’s Premier Access tier — is I guess what passes for original content from Disney these days. Those of us who’ve ever waited in line for 70 minutes to pay $18 for a terrible cheeseburger while in the vicinity of a minimum-wage employee in a brain-broilingly hot Mickey Mouse costume know the movie’s based on a Disney theme park ride that was/maybe still is rife with questionable cultural stereotypes. The film is not the usual Mouse House sequel, franchise piece or regurgitation of an old property, so hooray I guess? The draw here may be the cast, led by Disney-flick vets Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Emily “Poppins Redux” Blunt, the former of whom does his usual Rockin’ stuff while the latter of them does an interesting Indiana Jane Goodall thing. Sounds like a mess, but maybe it’ll work anyway. The Gist: It begins like no Disney movie ever before it, with heavy metal and what must absolutely be a Werner Herzog reference: We hear a Metallica song — OK, it’s the wimpiest one they ever wrote — then witness the legend of Aguirre (Edgar Ramirez), who we all know is the Wrath of God. He also quested for a long-lost legend of the thing and the whatsits, deep in the Amazon jungle, and that very whatever is what Lily Houghton (Emily Blunt) wants to find. It’s London,1916, and Lily is part of British society, where a WOMAN wearing TROUSERS is SCANDALOUS. She cannot convince the bejowled and harrumphing white men of the sciences to allow such a blatantly pantsed woman access to an artifact retrieved from the heart of Brazil, the very thing that could lead her to the place where a special flower exists that could have great healing properties, if you believe in ancient legends, and in the context of goliath Disney extravaganzas, why wouldn’t you? So she steals the thing, which is quite the rigamarole of crazy ladder action and flustered men with mustaches, and jets to Brazil with her brother MacGregor (Jack Whitehall). This doesn’t make German scheissekopf Prince Joachim (Jesse Plemons) happy, because he wanted the thing to get the thing, and so he dons his epaulettes and schleps his submarine to South America in pursuit. I’m not sure the Joachim diddledy-floo is all that necessary, but the movie wouldn’t feature the signature Disney Bloat without it.
