Mr. Movie: ‘Jungle Cruise’ needs all the help it can get

“Jungle Cruise” starts somewhere to the right of the old Humphrey Bogart-Katherine Hepburn flick, “The African Queen” and ends up just to the left of “The Pirates of the Caribbean.”

Better put, it’s all over the place.

The film stars two current box-office favorites, Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt.

It’s set along the Amazon River in Brazil in 1916. He’s Frank Wolff, the skipper of a broken down old sight-seeing boat. Blunt is an English doctor of botany, Lily Houghton. She is looking for a tree that has amazing healing powers.

Houghton takes advantage of the cash-poor Wolff and convinces him to take her on an expedition to find the tree.

Plenty of others are interested. That includes Prime Time Emmy nominee, Jesse Plemmons (TV’s “Fargo,” “Black Mirror,” “Judas and the Black Messiah”) who plays a German baddy, Prince Joachim. He has a submarine and modern weapons, and is determined to stop the pair from finding the tree first.

Joaquim wants the blossoms from the tree for personal power and enlists a group of conquistadors who attempted to find the tree three centuries earlier. This is where the plot shift leaves an African Queen-like plot and heads into Pirates territory.

Badly.

The story is penned by writers Michael Green and the team of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa and is based on a seven-minute Disney theme park ride. It’s woven into and around a curse placed upon the conquistadors when they tried to access the power of the tree.

Movie history has theme park ride movies being so-so in the plot department. This one is no exception.

Fortunately, the three writers are very good at their craft. Green co-wrote “Logan” and “Blade Runner 2049,” and penned “The Call of the Wild” and “Murder on the Orient Express. “Ficarra and Requa” did TV’s, “This is Us,” the two Bad Santa movies and a terrific Jim Carrey-starring semi-comedy called “I Love You Phillip Morris.”

It’s their writing skill that helps the two charismatic lead actors and the rest of the cast. They have Johnson’s Wolff being somewhat of a comedian who constantly throws out really bad wordplay jokes and puns. They’re so bad they’re almost funny.

A couple might even get you to laugh.

The adventure portion of the movie — under the supervision of director Juame Collet-Serra — doesn’t fare as well. In places it’s fun, but as the film sails down the Amazon, it takes on water faster than Wolff’s leaky boat.

With what looks like a limited budget, Collet-Serra also is forced to pack the movie with really cheesy effects. The worst is a badly done leopard doubling as Wolff’s pet.

Fortunately, neither Johnson nor Blunt, nor their costars, take their roles too seriously. Johnson is never better than when he does comedy and Blunt (“A Quiet Place” one and two) has excellent skills in that direction as well.

That helps. And this is a movie that needs all the help it can get.

Rated PG-13 for mature themes and some violence. It’s playing at the Fairchild Cinemas Pasco, Southgate 10 and Queensgate 12 theaters and at the AMC Classic Kennewick 12.

Rating: 3 1/2 out of 5

This story was originally published July 30, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Mr. Movie: ‘Jungle Cruise’ needs all the help it can get."