BEFORE: Dwayne Johnson carries over from "Walking Tall", probably for the last time this year, but he's done well in 2022, this makes seven movies for him, so he's currently tied with Susan Sarandon for third place, and I'm about two weeks away from Movie Year 14 being halfway over.
This is another one of those movies that played at the AMC last summer, but I didn't have the time to watch because, you know, I was busy working at the AMC. There can't possibly be many of those films left, I think I've seen most of them, except for "Cruella", "Respect", "Candyman" and "Dear Evan Hansen". Oh, and "A Quiet Place II", which I wish I could link to after this one via Emily Blunt, but it's not going to be possible.
If I can just knock off a few more of the films I missed last summer at the AMC, then I can move on to the films I missed while working at the next theater job, like "The Lost Daughter", "Licorice Pizza", "No Time to Die", "Belfast", "Cyrano", "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" and "The Harder They Fall". I've got solid plans to get to at least three of those before the end of this summer, the others may have to wait - hey, there will be a lot of slots in September and November/December to fill, and if not, well, there's always next year.
THE PLOT: Feisty English feminist Dr. Lily Houghton enlists the help of the arrogrant, wisecracking riverboat skipper, Captain Frank, to guide her through the Amazon River searching for something that cannot be found, because of a centuries-old curse.
AFTER: Wow, the judges are really split on this one tonight - this Disney film sparked a lively debate over whether it's a light-hearted action comedy in the vein of "The African Queen" with some of the stylings of "Raiders of the Lost Ark"... OR is it just a bunch of silly random plot elements collected together in a giant failure pile? Oddly, it feels like it's somehow BOTH of those things, but how can that even be possible? There's just too too MUCH of everything here, there's no subtlety, it's just commerce over art in the worst way, right? Damn it, why did it also have to be fun and somewhat enjoyable, that REALLY makes things difficult for our panel of esteemed judges to come to an agreement and assign a numerical rating.
Let's face it, The Rock is always fun, and since he learned how to comedy, since the "Jumanji" films at least, he's become even more fun. He's a giant ball of positive attitude walking around, nothing can stop him, he can do anything, even impossible things, and that's before you even add on movie magic, good guys always winning and special effects lending a hand. And Disney films are great at exactly those things, too, they've come a long way since "The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again".
But the problem here is that Disney had an agenda, too - there's a ride at their theme parks called "Jungle Cruise" that's been around for forever, and since they had such luck turning the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride into a franchise, there's impetus to do the same. Turn the ride into the film, then if the film takes off, more people will come to DisneyWorldLand and suddenly that dusty old ride will be relevant again! Didn't that also work for "Haunted Mansion"? And the "Dumbo" ride? And I think they finally got rid of the "Song of the South" characters around Splash Mountain and turned it into a new ride based on "The Princess and the Frog". It's smart marketing, I'll give you that, but not every movie has to also be a two-hour long commercial for the theme parks, does it? I know, probably they all do. Just please never make "Hall of Presidents: The Movie".
They just had to give The Rock's character something memorable, so they borrowed a lot from the ride, Frank Wolff is a guy with a boat who gives tours of the Amazon, and he's got a whole section of the river set up with fake hippos and non-dangerous dangers to scare/entertain the tourists, and that ends up looking a lot like...the Jungle Cruise ride at DisneyWorld, of course. He also has a barrage of bad "Dad jokes" that the ride operators have become semi-famous for, and it's not cute, it's not funny, this is actually the opposite of funny. OK, so you're making a movie and you decide to put intentionally BAD jokes into the script. Oh, better idea, hear me out, put GOOD and FUNNY jokes in the script, and maybe that would be more entertaining. Just a thought.
Frank's a simple guy, just trying to carve out a meager living with his boat, giving tours of the same stretch of river, day after day, just a squirrel trying to get a nut, carve out a place for himself in the world by making a (very) little amount of money. But then this woman explorer comes into his life, hires his boat to take her and her brother to the most dangerous part of the river, and suddenly his life is flip-turned upside-down. But just wait, later in the film we all learn the truth about him, and it's for some reason the most complicated back-story in the history of movies, I couldn't believe it or even follow most of it. It's another quite questionable decision on the behalf of the screenwriters, with their need to overthink everything.
The woman explorer (who has the nerve in the year 1916 to both speak her mind AND wear pants!) is searching for some rare tree petals called the Tears of the Moon, which have the abiity to cure any disease, heal any wound. Naturally this would be a great asset to have during the Great War (aka the War to End All Wars That Didn't Do That), so also naturally there's a German (or Prussian?) Prince who's also looking for the same thing, so that Germany can win the war. See, just like "Raiders of the Lost Ark", except it's a different war going on, and a different MacGuffin that everyone's looking for, but Germans are always the bad guys in period action movies like this.
The movie takes a while to really get rolling - if it feels metaphorically like the boat's taking a long time to leave the docks, that's probably because that's exactly what's happening, it takes the boat like half an hour to set sail, after being delayed by a CGI jaguar, a bar-fight, and Paul Giamatti demanding more money for appearing in this film. There's also a meet-cute, a case of mistaken identity, everybody orders dinner, they negotiate some more, the gay brother brings too much luggage - for God's sake just GET IN THE BOAT already and stop wasting my time.
Along the way, every single little point stated or fact revealed is contradicted, re-stated and then contradicted again. If anybody in this film could just SAY something and have another person believe it, things would go a lot faster - but it's just not that kind of movie. Even what we know about the main characters gets revealed to be lies and then we have to re-learn who they all are again, what a damn waste of words. There's a tribe of cannibal headhunters, so we're in danger - only they're NOT who they appear to be, so no danger. Je-SUS! Tell me one thing that happens that doesn't then turn out to be misdirection or gets forced to un-happen so it can happen all over again...
The German prince guy finds some humans turned into statues, and when he drops river water on them, they turn back into living Conquistadors, only for some reason one of them is made up of snakes, one's made up of bees, and another is made of mud. Yeah, special effects are great and all, but just because you can DO all this with effects, it does NOT mean that these are good ideas, from a story standpoint. The more complicated you make these primitive curses, the more of a giant mess this story becomes.
I don't know, there's part of me that wants to champion a movie that really GOES for it, swings for the fences, where the writers and crew ask questions like, "How many glowing pink petals can we put on a giant tree?" and "How close can we have a boat come to going over a waterfall without it actually falling over?" and "How red can we make Paul Giamatti's face look before he starts to resemble Satan himself?" But then the other part of my brain kicks in and says that if you have to SPEND $200 million just to MAKE $220 million at the box office, maybe you shouldn't have bothered at all, probably there was a better way to use that money. But in the long run, this is a mostly enjoyable film that's sure to increase theme-park attendance and help Disney's bottom line in the third quarter - as they say, a rising tide lifts all boats, theoretically at least.
I've got to call a NITPICK POINT on the portrayal of piranhas as deadly, flesh-eating buzzsaws of the Amazon River. It's astounding to me that people still believe this, in real life they're just not as deadly as movies and TV would have you believe. What happened was, way back in the day, President Teddy Roosevelt visited Brazil, and for his entertainment, a bunch of Brazilians took some piranha and blocked them off in a cove, away from food, and starved them for quite some time. Then they lowered a live animal into the river, and the starving piranhas attacked it - it was all for show, they don't always act like little Tasmanian Devil-like fish - but the legends about them have persisted over the decades. Same thing with lemmings, they don't follow each other blindly off of cliffs and commit suicide en masse - that was all fabricated for a nature documentary made back in the 1950's by, wait for it - the Disney Corporation. Please, look both of these things up if you don't believe me.
Also starring Emily Blunt (last seen in "The Jane Austen Book Club"), Edgar Ramirez (last seen in "Resistance"), Jack Whitehall (last seen in "Mother's Day"), Jesse Plemons (last seen in "The Power of the Dog"), Paul Giamatti (last seen in "The Phenom"), Veronica Falcón, Dani Rovira, Quim Gutiérrez, Dan Dargan Carter, Andy Nyman (last seen in "Judy"), Raphael Alejandro (last seen in "How to Be a Latin Lover"), Simone Lockhart, Pedro Lopez (last seen in "The Boss"), Sulem Calderon, Stephen Dunlevy (last seen in "Rampage"), Philipp Maximilian, David Lengel (last seen in "Coming 2 America")
RATING: 6 out of 10 pink river dolphins (they WILL steal your soul, this one is true...)
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