It’s been obvious to anyone with eyes, ears and half a brain that Jaume Collet-Serra‘s Jungle Cruise (Disney, 7.30) is both an homage and an insult to the lore of John Huston‘s The African Queen (’51).
Jungle Cruise costars Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt have made no secret of the fact that their respective characters, “Skipper” Frank Wolff and Dr. Lily Houghton, are roughly modelled on Charlie Allnut and Rose Sayer, the Queen characters played 70-odd years ago by Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. And of course the basic set-ups are similar.
Of course, Serra and Cruise cowriters Michael Green, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa never had the slightest intention in making the soon-to-open Disney release into any kind of African Queen companion piece. They intended, in fact, to lampoon (i.e., fool around with) the 1951 original, and thereby cheapen it to some extent.
Jungle Cruise is obviously adhering to a classic formula — a flawed male alpha figure in the front-and-center position with a spirited woman of refinement and sensitivity who steps in and gradually ups his game.
Jungle Cruise boilerplate: “Frank, a boat captain, takes his sister and her brother on a mission into a jungle to find a tree believed to possess healing powers. All the while, the trio must fight against dangerous wild animals and a competing German expedition.”
I’ve said this before, but the trailers have made it clear that Jungle Cruise is exactly the kind of ultra-synthetic, X-treme adventure, CG overload, Indiana Jones-aspiring, family-friendly megaplex film that, in my mind, is killing the idea of conveying real big-screen adventure. And no one gives a damn.
A couple of weeks ago Yahoo Entertainment’s Ethan Alter interviewed Humphrey Bogart’s son, Stephen Bogart. The piece was about his father’s legacy and particularly that of The African Queen.
“I never really thought of it as a comedy,” Bogart tells Alter. “[My dad’s] relationship with Katie is funny, even if they don’t play it as funny.” Actually Hepburn and Bogart do play it for the amusement factor as far as that goes, and they do what they can to stoke the unusual romantic current that develops between them.
As you might expect, Alter gets into the p.c. factor — could The African Queen (which is set German East Africa in 1914) be remade today? By today’s standards, he notes, the most notable omission in Huston’s film “is the lack of any Black characters in significant roles.”
Alter declines to mention that Jungle Cruise, also set around the same time period (i.e., “early 20th Century”), has no major Black characters either — the costars are Jack Whitehall, Édgar Ramírez, Jesse Plemons and Paul Giamatti.
The 72 year-old Bogart nonetheless believes that a contemporary version of The African Queen, if literally remade, “wouldn’t be made that way today…I don’t know how you make it differently, but it would have been made differently. A lot of films would have been made differently today versus back then, and that’s not necessarily bad and it’s not necessarily good. It’s just a different time.”
Alter and Bogart’s implication is that if The African Queen were to be sincerely remade, it might work better in a present political-cultural context (at least as far as Hollywood wokesters are concerned) if Charlie Allnut was made into a Black native. If that change were to happen, it would naturally follow that Rose Sayer, a prim and proper white missionary from England, would become Charlie’s lover. That would actually be something! Especially in the realm of 1914.
The strangest observation in the article is Stephen Bogart‘s belief that “The Rock” is cut from the same cloth as his late dad.
“That guy is no fool,” Bogart says of the 49 year-old musclebound superstar, who has never made a critically approved film in his entire life. “He was devoted to wrestling and he’s gotten a lot better as an actor. He’s got a personality, and it comes across on screen. I like Dwayne Johnson. I respect what he’s done, he seems like a really good person and I definitely want to see Jungle Cruise“….aaaaghhhh!
Stephen tells Alter that his dad would “definitely get along” with Johnson, if they were somehow brought together by time and fate.
Yeah, they might “get along” (i.e., treat each other pleasantly and respectfully in a social setting) but Humphrey Bogart prided himself on being a serious actor — he cared about realism and conviction and knowing his craft. That is something Dwayne Johnson has never cared about in the slightest, certainly not in the Bogart sense. To him movies are (a) light=hearted fantasy distractions and (b) paydays.
Posted on 8.2.18: Imagine being complacent enough to actually consider buying tickets to see Jungle Cruise. Imagine being that pliant, that willing.
What percentage of the potential Jungle Cruise audience has even heard of The African Queen, much less seen it? What percentage of this percentage would care one way or the other? The culture that knows and cares about classic 20th Century cinema is fading fast.