Take a Wild Ride Down the Amazon!

Kaleidoscope returns with its first new review in 6 months:  Walt Disney Pictures' & Davis Entertainment's production of "Jungle Cruise".  Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, the movie stars Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Jack Whitehall, Jesse Plemons, Edgar Ramirez, Paul Giamatti, & Veronica Falcon.  Rated 'PG-13', it has a running time of 2 hours, 7 minutes.

In the 1500's, Don Aguirre (Ramirez) leads his group of Spanish Conquistadors to look for a tree of myth whose petals are said to cure any wounds, any illness, & lift any curse--the Tears of the Moon!  Altho most of the soldiers die in the jungle, Aguirre & a few others are rescued by a local tribe, given the petals, & their lives are saved.  Aguirre then asks the tribe's chief to tell him where the Tree is located.  When the chief refuses, Aguirre stabs him, & his men destroy the tribe's village.  As the chief is dying, he puts a curse on Aguirre & his men: if they ever leave the Amazon, the river will destroy them.  Transition to the film's present day (1916).  Dr. Lily Houghton (Blunt) & her brother MacGregor (Whitehall) are presenting Lily's research paper on the Tears of the Moon, explaining that the Tree's petals would help change medicine & the Empire's war efforts.  Lily & her brother ask that they have access to an ancient arrowhead that Lily believes is central to locating the Tree.  The association, however, denies their request for 2 reasons: 1) the Tree does not exist, 2) a woman scientist is unqualified to join the association.  Thru a ruse, Lily steals the arrowhead, narrowly missing running into Prince Joachim (Plemons), a German aristocrat who is also after the Tree.  Concurrently in South America, Capt. Frank Wolff (Johnson) conducts river cruises on the Amazon & peppers his commentary with corny jokes & sham dangers.  Soon, his boat is repossessed by the harbormaster, Nilo (Giamatti), & Frank attempts to steal it back.  Act I closes as Lily & MacGregor arrive at the harbor, seeking to hire a boat to take them down the Amazon.

Collet-Serra, an action film veteran ("House of Wax", "Non Stop", "The Commuter", "The Shallows", & the forth-coming "Black Adam", also with Johnson) has directed with a competent mixture of exposition, comedic, & action sequences.  While this works for a while, the string of events soon becomes predictable & wearisome; he & his editor, Joel Negron, should have tightened this concatenation & trimmed minutes from the movie's overlong running time.  Part of the blame is also attributable to the screenplay--no less than five writers had a hand in the movie's screen story & script.  Besides wholesale borrowing of puns, jokes, double entendres, & innuendos from the Disney Parks' ride. the plot's meandering, like the Amazon's course, gets taxing halfway through Act II.  Johnson, the world's biggest box-office star, does his usual able-bodied combination of witty antihero & performing above average action star feats of derring-do.  No one can throw off a jocular line quite like he.  There are definite comparisons between his Wolff & Bogart's Charlie Allnut in "The African Queen".  Blunt handles her Indiana Jones-distaff role with aplomb.  She is very good as both an action heroine (see "A Quiet Place 2") & rogue scholar out to prove that women are just as good as men when it comes to entering into the heart of darkness; she also shines in her humorous moments.  Whitehall is very good as Lily's foppish brother.  He displays the proper awkwardness as he slowly transitions from being completely uncomfortable with a lack of social grace in the jungle to one who can ably keep up with the others.  Plemons is a hoot as the film's requisite villain; he practically snarls out most of his lines in his German-accented, Snidely Whiplash manner.  Altho he veers too much, at times, into caricature; one is smiling too much to give it much notice.  While Ramirez & Giamatti are fine, their roles are no more than extended cameos.  My initial exposure to Falcon was in this season's "Why Women Kill"; I was impressed by her elevating a side role into something more.  She does the same here in a minor role as she holds the screen whenever she is on.  Flavio Martinez Fabiano's cinematography is rich & colorful and glides as effortlessly as Wolff's ship thru the River.  Prolific composer James Newton Howard has written some beautifully evocative & haunting scores ("The Sixth Sense", "Unbreakable", "Batman Begins", "The Dark Knight); this one, however, is routine & mundane.  It supports the cruise but adds nothing remarkable.

I give "Jungle Cruise" 6 out of 10 nuggets.  It is an average Disney adventure film that does not stand out in any way.  If one has a choice between seeing the film or riding the ride at Disneyland or World, I choose the latter.It is, however, fine for children & families either at the theater or on Disney+ Premier.