Jungle Cruise (Walt Disney Enterprises, Davis Entertainment, Flynn Pictures Company, Seven Bucks Productions, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The one nice thing that happened to my husband Charles and I last night was the unexpectedly good movie we watched together: Jungle Cruise, the latest effort of the Walt Disney entertainment empire to turn one of the Disney theme-park attractions into a feature-film franchise. I went to Disneyland a few times in the 1980’s – back when you could still go there without having to take out a second mortgage to pay for the cost of admission – but I never got to take the Jungle Cruise ride because the people I was with kept telling me, “Oh, you don’t want to do that. It’s boring.” But I found myself interested in watching the Jungle Cruise movie because the TV promos for it made it seem like a reworking of the 1952 classic The African Queen, albeit with two considerably less high-voltage stars: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Humphrey Bogart and Emily Blunt as Katharine Hepburn. It was directed by Jaume Collet-Serra from a script by a five-member writing committee: John Norville, Josh Goldstein, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa for “story” and Ficarra, Requa and Michael Green for “screenplay.” Fortunately, the Disney machine is well-oiled enough that this ragbag of writers and an unknown director were able to come up with a marvelously entertaining movie, essentially a modern-day screwball comedy that took an enviably light-hearted approach to some pretty threadbare material.

It begins with MacGregor Houghton (Jack Whitehall) giving a lecture before the Royal Academy of Sciences in London in 1916 (in the middle of World War I – also, not coincidentally, the time in which The African Queen was set) explaining that somewhere in the Amazon, about on the border between Brazil and Peru, is a secret lagoon where grows a tree called the Tears of the Moon whose flowers have the potential to heal all human diseases. The head of the Royal Academy recognizes the pitch to back an expedition to find this flower as the same one they’d turned down earlier when it was presented by a woman – MacGregor’s sister Lily, who actually scripted her brother’s presentation and is in the audience watching. She alson steals a priceless arrowhead from the museum's collection that contains a clue to the location of the Tears of the Moon. (Even the character name “Houghton” is a reference to the female star of The African Queen: Katharine Hepburn’s mother’s maiden name was Houghton and the actress’s full name was Katharine Houghton Hepburn.) The Royal Academy members are aghast at the whole idea that a woman could be in charge of anything – which seems like a glitch on the part of the writers to me, since the film is set just 15 years after the death of Queen Victoria and all the fuddy-duddies in that room are clearly old enough to have had living memories of her reign. Being a Walt Disney action-adventure movie from the 21st century – especially one based on one of the Disneyland attractions personally designed by Walt Disney himself and the so-called “Imagineers” under his direction, there should be no surprise that there’s a supernatural element to the MacGuffin: we’re expected to believe that 400 years before the main action a group of conquistadores went searching for the Tears of the Moon tree and actually found it, only when the natives caught them they put a curse on them and in particular their leader, Aguirre (Edgar Ramirez), in particular. The curse was that the conquistadores would be frozen in place, neither fully alive nor dead, and if anyone came by and tried to rescue them, snakes would come out of the zombified conquistdores’ bodies and kill them.

The action then cuts to the Amazon tour boat captained by Frank Wolff (Dwayne Johnson), who leads groups up and down the river giving lectures about the sights which abound in the famously awful puns from the real Disney theme-park jungle cruises. He’s in the middle of a disagreement with an entrepreneur who owns all the other jungle-cruise boats plowing the Amazon and to whom Frank owes 5,000 reales – the guy even repossesses Frank’s engine because, like the bad guy in the 1933 W, C, Fields-Alisoh Skipworth vehicle Tillie and Gus, he wants a monopoly on the business, Just then Lily and MacGregor Houghton show up carrying whole wads of cash and asking to hire Frank and his boat for an expedition to seek the Tears of the Moon, and he accepts because it’s the only way Frank can buy back his engine and put himself back in business. The film is full of touches borrowed from The African Queen, including Frank’s peremptory disposal of most of the Houghtons’ trunks as too much to carry on the trip (he lets MacGregor keep his liquor supply because “that might come in handy,” evoking the real-life tale of the making of The African Queen in which Katharine Hepburn primly refused to drink alcohol and got dysentery from the local water, while Humphrey Bogart and director John Huston brought along cases of whiskey, did everything with it – including brushing their teeth – and stayed healthy throughout the shoot) and Emily’s experience going down a section of rapids, which she describes as “exhilarating.” (Earlier the boat comes to a fork in the river and Lily insists on taking the right fork because that route will be two days quicker, Frank tries to warn her that this route contains rapids, and I joked, “Bogart and Hepburn went through rapids. We have to go through rapids, too!”)

Also in the dramatis personae are a German submarine and his crew, led by Prince Joachim (Jesse Plemons, who seems to have gone to the Christoph Waltz School of How to Play an Evil German), supposedly the youngest son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who is stalking Our Heroes so Gernany can get the petals of the Tears of the Moon’s flowers and use their magical healing powers for his side in the war (ya remember the war?). We also get a sly but well-written and sympathetic revelation that MacGregor Houghton is Gay – obviously this is not Walt Disney’s Walt Disney – though it tempted me to remix the later scenes of the movie so that instead of torturing MacGregor to reveal the secret of where the Tears of the Moon tree is located, Prince Joachim gives him such great sex that MaGregor falls helplessly in love with him and gives up the secret voluntarily. I was also hoping that instead of pairing Frank and Lily at the end, the writers would have given him a menage a trois in which he’d end up servicing both Houghtons.

The first half of Jungle Cruise is one of the most purely joyous movies I’ve seen in some time – a sign that modern filmmakers can recover the insouciance of their counterparts from Hollywood’s classic era. Then [spoiler alerts!] the plot resolutions rear their ugly heads and Aguirre is able to come back to normal life, while Frank is revealed really to be one of the old conquistadores, able to withstand being stabbed, shot at and thrown off a cliff. I’m not sure if the writers had seen the 1944 German version of Baron Munchhausen but their ending – Lily uses the one remaining petal of the Tears of the Moon to convert Frank into a normal human, no longer immortal but also no longer stuck on the Amazon and able to travel with her to Britain (where the film ends with a quite funny scene of her trying to teach him how to drive a car – obviously the attempt by the writing committee to go for irony given Johnson’s ongoing role as one of the super-drivers in the Fast and Furious series!) – was going for the same sort of pathos. In the 1944 Munchhausen the immortal Baron Munchhausen has fallen ln love with a mortal woman, but he realizes that she’s going to age and die while he maintains his youth, so he gives up his immortality so he can enjoy at least the length of a normal human lifespan with her. The makers of Jungle Cruise don’t quite achieve the pathos of the makers of the 1944 Baron Munchhausen,but they make a nice try that provides a decent, even if awfully Disney-esque, ending to a surprisingly good and quite entertaining film.