Jungle Cruise

I pretty much had to see the movie Jungle Cruise because it is based on one of the few rides at Disneyland that I will willingly go on!  I saw it last night at a Thursday preview and I really enjoyed it.  At the height of World War I, Dr. Lily Houghton (Emily Blunt) finds an artifact that leads to the Tree of Life which, according to legend, has powerful healing powers.  She and her fastidious brother McGregor (Jack Whitehall) travel to Brazil and hire a reluctant Captain Frank Wolff (Dwayne Johnson) to take them down the Amazon River in his dilapidated steamboat to find it.  They have a series of misadventures involving heat, wild animals, cannibals, and treacherous rapids but they are also being pursued by an ancient conquistador (Edgar Ramirez) who is trying to undo a curse that has kept him in the jungle for hundreds of years and a German aristocrat (Jesse Plemons) who wants to use the power to win the war.  Many of the action sequences feature very obvious (and subpar) CGI but they are certainly entertaining and exciting.  Johnson and Blunt are fantastic and have great chemistry, especially with their back-and-forth bickering (but not when their relationship inevitably turns romantic).  All of Frank's groan-worthy puns are so much fun because they reminded me of the ride at Disneyland.  Whitehall provides a lot of comic relief and, while McGregor's backstory might divide critics and audiences, I found it to be very affecting.  Ramirez is suitably creepy as Aguirre but I found the story of the Spanish conquistador to be very convoluted.  Plemons steals the show as the bombastic Prince Joachim and I laughed out loud at many of his over-the-top antics.  I also enjoyed the music by James Newton Howard and, rather unusually, Metallica (an instrumental version of "Nothing Else Matters" is used in a key scene and I think it is very effective).  This is not a masterpiece but it is a fun summer blockbuster that most will probably enjoy and I definitely recommend it.

Note:  This reminded me a lot of The Mummy, one of my favorite action movies, because they both feature smart, capable, and adventurous female characters (and they both have fun scenes involving library ladders).