WARNING: The following contains minor spoilers for Disney's Jungle Cruise, opening Friday in theaters nationwide and streaming on Disney+ Premier Access.
It's been 18 years since a feature film based on an amusement park ride -- Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl -- landed in multiplexes and became a franchise-spawning hit. Four sequels followed, with diminishing returns, so it makes sense that Disney would want to abandon ship and start over with a new property. They didn't have to search far and wide, though, as Jungle Cruise, the ride, is Pirates' next door neighbor at Disneyland and Walt Disney World. But while the two have much in common, Jungle Cruise, the movie, will remind viewers of another turn-of-the-century action-adventure flick -- one that's become even more popular and well-regarded with age.
At a time when sarcasm and gritty futurism reigned at the box office, 1999's The Mummy was perfect counterprogramming. It combined the earnest cheesiness of epics of a bygone Hollywood era with budding computer graphics that could make, for example, a giant screaming face appear in a sandstorm. The Mummy was scary, sexy, fun and still pretty family-friendly, and it's hard for any movie to check all those boxes.
Brendan Fraser, at the height of his powers, is Rick O'Connell, a PG-13 bad boy adventurer who teams up with Rachel Weisz's tough but scholarly Evelyn Carnarvon to find the lost city of Hamunaptra. John Hannah plays her broadly comedic foppish brother, and the unlikely trio must outsmart and outrun nefarious others who are on the same quest, with the help of some local (and sidelined) people of color. An artifact that unlocks secrets serves as a MacGuffin, a mythology that turns out to be true propels all the action forward and the final villain is a centuries-old victim of a curse, rendered with iffy CGI.
Flash forward a little more than two decades, and Disney has built Jungle Cruise from largely the same components. Dwayne Johnson is Frank, a PG-13 bad boy riverboat captain who teams up with Emily Blunt's tough but scholarly Lily Houghton to find some lost spot on a map in the Amazon. John Whitehall plays her broadly comedic foppish brother MacGregor, and the unlikely trio must outsmart and outrun a German prince who is on the same quest, with the help of some local (and sidelined) people of color. An artifact -- this time an arrowhead on a string worn around the neck instead of a sunburst -- unlocks the secrets to the mythology that propels the action forward. And to up the ante, three final boss villains are centuries-old victims of a curse, rendered with disappointingly iffy CGI for 2021.
The Mummy and Jungle Cruise even take place within a decade of each other, though they draw from different histories and legends that date further back. The Mummy is set in 1926, as Rick and Evelyn get to the bottom of some Ancient Egyptian magical mysteries, while Jungle Cruise sets sail in 1916, as Frank and Lily get to the bottom of some 1500s conquistador shenanigans. Both films include nearly identical set pieces that involve escapes from libraries. In both cases, the blue-collar hero and the white-collar heroine start out bickering and wind up falling in love, which is a recognizable trope, but one that's rare in live-action Disney movies and even rarer in movies starring The Rock.
Sure, The Mummy is the better movie, thanks in part to Fraser's well-calibrated performance and his chemistry with the equally excellent Weisz and the fact that it's inspired by actual mythology (and the 1932 original) and not a theme park attraction. Emily Blunt is up to the challenge in Jungle Cruise, but Johnson can't quite inhabit his role and those period costumes the way Fraser did, and his burgeoning romance with Blunt doesn't smolder as it needs to. Still, Jungle Cruise improves on the formula in a few notable ways -- a mildly clever but necessary plot twist lets the indigenous people in on the joke, and MacGregor acknowledges his queer status, which keeps the pinky-up brother character from ever really becoming the butt of one.
Though Disney borrowed a lot from The Mummy, it didn't forget what worked about the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Like Pirates, Jungle Cruise plays out on boats and involves plenty of swashbuckling and swinging from ropes on docks. But it's the film's twist, in which Frank is revealed to be one of the four conquistadors cursed with immortality and held captive by the river, that's reminiscent of Jack Sparrow and Captain Barbosa's frenemy dynamic, born of complicated morality and betrayal. Jungle Cruise isn't better than the first Pirates movie, either, but Pirates and The Mummy made a lasting impression and are high standards to live up to. This new park-to-screen adventure does well enough for itself with its interpretation of the character archetypes, the approachable tone and a heavy dose of magical realism, but only time will tell if well-enough translates into a Jungle Cruise cinematic universe.
To see how Jungle Cruise evokes both Pirates of the Caribbean and The Mummy, the film is in theaters now and streaming on Disney+ Premier Access.
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