As we speak Jungle Cruise (Disney, opening today) has a cruddy 61% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and an even lower 49% from Metacritic. I won’t be sitting through this sure-to-be-spirit-numbing film until late this afternoon, but I’ve been sniffing its approach for months. Here’s my final general impression reaction:
I understand some critics giving a passing grade to Jungle Cruise because, after all, what’s the point of complaining about hack filmmaking of this magnitude? Just ease up and roll with it — not worth the trouble, right?
But it’s clearly proclaiming its allegiance to nothing-ness and the sensibility of easy-lay audiences who don’t know any better (or don’t WANT to know any better)…whose taste in mainstream entertainment has been systematically degraded over the last few decades by films with a similar ‘80s-flavored, CG-propelled, Spielberg-and-Lucas-on-steroids attitude…this is a movie clearly crafted by forces of expedient corporate Satanism.
The basic idea seems to be “are we proud of our emptiness…you BET we are! Proud and having fun with it! We don’t give a damn about anything but making family-friendly money so why should you, the audience, have any beefs on your end?’
Everything I feel in my gut and can sense from the punishing trailers tells me Jungle Cruise is pure escapist soul cancer.
What doth it profit a man to wave through such a thing? A film that obviously doesn’t give a hoot about anything in terms of true-blue movie transportation…a film that’s having such a good time farting in the faces of people like myself?
And has there ever been an alleged movie star more deeply and systematically opposed to starring in a good, well-crafted movie (i.e., crisp, professional, tightly written) than Dwayne Johnson? All this glib opportunistic Republican wants to do is stay in shape, toss off knowing “ironic wise-ass” dialogue and star in shitty, financially successful films. The man has nothing inside him but ambition — he’s all about the hustle and the stock options. He and Chris Pratt are cut from the same cloth.
