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In the pantheon of Disney movies based on Disney theme park rides, "Jungle Cruise" is pretty good—leagues better than dreck like "Haunted Mansion," though not quite as satisfying as the original "Pirates of the Caribbean."

The most pleasant surprise is that director Jaume Collet-Serra (" The Shallows ") and a credited team of five, count 'em, writers have largely jettisoned the ride's mid-century American colonial snarkiness and casual racism (a tradition only recently eliminated ). Setting the revamp squarely in the wheelhouse of blockbuster franchise-starters like " Raiders of the Lost Ark ," " Romancing the Stone " and "The Mummy," and pushing the fantastical elements to the point where the story barely seems to be taking place in our universe, it's a knowingly goofy romp, anchored to the banter between its leads, an English feminist and adventurer played by Emily Blunt and a riverboat captain/adventurer played by Dwayne Johnson .

Notably, however, even though the stars' costumes (and a waterfall sequence) evoke the classic "The African Queen"—John Huston's comic romance/action film starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn ; worth looking up if you've never watched it—the sexual chemistry between the two is nonexistent, save for a few fleeting moments, like when Frank picks up the heroine‘s hand-cranked silent film camera and captures affectionate images of her. At times the leads seem more like a brother and sister needling each other than a will they/won’t they bantering couple. Lack of sexual heat is often (strangely) a bug, or perhaps a feature, in films starring Johnson, the four-quadrant blockbuster king (though not on Johnson’s HBO drama "Ballers"). Blunt keeps putting out more than enough flinty looks of interest to sell a romance, but her leading man rarely reflects it back at her. Fortunately, the film's tight construction and prolific action scenes carry it, and Blunt and Johnson do the irresistible force/immovable object dynamic well enough, swapping energies as the story demands.

Blunt's character, Lily Houghton, is a well-pedigreed adventurer who gathers up maps belonging to her legendary father and travels to the Amazon circa 1916 to find the Tears of the Moon, petals from a "Tree of Life"-type of fauna that can heal all infirmities. She and her snooty, pampered brother MacGregor (Jack Whitehall) hire Frank "Skipper" Wolff (Johnson) to bring them to their destination. The only notable concession to the original theme park ride comes here: Wolff's day job is taking tourists upriver and making cheesy jokes in the spirit of "hosts" on Disney Jungle Cruise rides of yore. On the mission, Johnson immediately settles into a cranky but funny old sourpuss vibe, a la John Wayne or Harrison Ford , and inhabits it amiably enough, even though buoyant, almost childlike optimism comes more naturally to him than world-weary gruffness.

The supporting cast is stacked with overqualified character players. Paul Giamatti plays a gold-toothed, sunburned, cartoonishly “Italian” harbor master who delights at keeping Frank in debt. Edgar Ramirez is creepy and scary as a conquistador whose curse from centuries ago has trapped him in the jungle. Jesse Plemons plays the main baddie, Prince Joachim, who wants to filch the power of the petals for the Kaiser back in Germany (he's Belloq to the stars' Indy and Marion, trying to swipe the Ark). Unsurprisingly, given his track record, Plemons steals the film right out from under its leads.

Collet-Serra keeps the action moving along, pursuing a more classical style than is commonplace in recent live-action Disney product (by which I mean, the blocking and editing have a bit of elegance, and you always know where characters are in relation to each other). The editing errs on the side of briskness to such an extent that affecting, beautiful, or spectacular images never get to linger long enough to become iconic. The CGI is dicey, particularly on the larger jungle animals—was the production rushed, or were the artists just overworked?—and there are moments when everything seems so rubbery/plasticky that you seem to be watching the first film that was actually shot on location at Disney World.

But the staging and execution of the chases and fights compensates. Derivative of films that were themselves highly derivative, "Jungle Cruise" has the look and feel of a paycheck gig for all involved, but everyone seems to be having a great time, including the filmmakers.

In theaters and on Disney+ for a premium charge starting Friday, July 30th.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film credits.

Jungle Cruise (2021)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of adventure violence.

127 minutes

Dwayne Johnson as Frank Wolff

Emily Blunt as Dr. Lily Houghton

Jack Whitehall as McGregor Houghton

Edgar Ramírez as Aguirre

Jesse Plemons as Prince Joachim

Paul Giamatti as Nilo

Jaume Collet-Serra

Writer (story)

Glenn Ficarra
Josh Goldstein
John Norville

Cinematographer

Flavio Martínez Labiano
Joel Negron
James Newton Howard

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Jungle Cruise Reviews

I think we would all agree to hop in a boat with these two as they take us on an adventure.

Full Review | Aug 22, 2023

The SUMMER ADVENTURE you all need to go on! With vibes from Raiders of the Lost Ark to Pirates of the Caribbean! this movie will bring a smile to your face the entire cruise.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

Sometimes movies should exist to be entertainment, purely and simply. Jungle Cruise should have been that, and it’s a shame there was not enough charisma to keep it afloat.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Jungle Cruise is exactly what it makes itself out to be: a big-name summer blockbuster...

Full Review | Feb 23, 2023

A family adventure through familiar, albeit shallow, waters.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Feb 13, 2023

Any minor quibbles are outshone by the star power wattage generated by Johnson and Blunt. If Johnson is still the Most Electrifying Man In Entertainment, then Emily Blunt is a superconductor.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 12, 2022

Book your trip on Jungle Cruise now. It’s a first-class ticket.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 9, 2022

JUNGLE CRUISE (the movie) was based on "Jungle Cruise", a Disneyland ride, so I wasn't expecting much, and was definitely pleasantly surprised. All in all, this is a fun movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Sep 18, 2022

The script (from the trio of Michael Green, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa) is silly and light-hearted, reminiscent of the late-1960’s pulp you would find at a Saturday afternoon matinee.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 17, 2022

Inspired, too inspired, on its titular Disney attraction ride. Dwayne Johnson is practically the attraction's tour guide. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jul 18, 2022

Jungle Cruise manages to coast on the charm of its two leads, making it a fun, if somewhat forgettable, adventure.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | May 18, 2022

JUNGLE CRUISE is a really enjoyable retro action-adventure film for the entire family, that shines with its great stars, wonderful chemistry and a surprisingly good and always entertaining story.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Apr 7, 2022

Despite the flaws, theres something about Jungle Cruise that just works. Its a traditional summer blockbuster that combines charming leads with enough adventure to keep everyone happy.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 3, 2022

Unlike the vast majority of other recent Disney Live-Action features, Jungle Cruise is a film easy to have a good time with.

Full Review | Feb 22, 2022

If theres a ride that the Jungle Cruise feels more like than the Jungle Cruise, its Pirates of the Caribbean. And sadly, I have to say that this is this movies biggest downfall.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Feb 16, 2022

No amount of money, not even the reported 200 million budget, can help Jungle Cruise avoid tasting like a hunk of processed meat from the Disney conveyor belt.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 12, 2022

Jungle Cruise is passable light-hearted family entertainment.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 12, 2022

As far as these things go, this one isn't half-bad, and that's almost entirely due to the presence of Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 21, 2021

Successfully brings a beloved Disneyland ride to life.

Full Review | Nov 12, 2021

The scenery is beautiful and it is a fun ride along with Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson but it is no African Queen.

Full Review | Original Score: 5 | Oct 30, 2021

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Disney’s Jungle Cruise Is Murder

“The jungle,” Werner Herzog used to say, “is murder.” Although Disney’s Jungle Cruise is ostensibly based on the popular theme-park ride, one could say that it has taken Herzog’s immortal maxim as a kind of surface inspiration. “Know this about the jungle,” Dwayne Johnson’s riverboat captain Frank says early in the film, “everything you see wants to kill you — and can.” There are other Herzog callbacks in the film: The villains include the Spanish conquistador Lope de Aguirre (the subject of one of Herzog’s best-known films, Aguirre, the Wrath of God ) as well as an obsessive German aristocrat named Prince Joachim (Jesse Plemons), who seems to sport Herzog’s accent ; there’s even an extended gag at one point about the Herzogian way Joachim pronounces “jungle”: “chonk-leh.” Whatever. I chuckled. Sue me.

Herzog is an odd reference point, surely, but that’s also in keeping with the central tension in Jungle Cruise , between the darker, more intense and exciting movie it clearly wants to be and the mealymouthed CGI panderfest that it is. Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra — a filmmaker previously known for gonzo thrillers like Orphan and The Shallows and some of the more compelling entries in the Liam Neeson dadsploitation subgenre — the picture might have amounted to something had it been able to deliver on the one essential element any kind of adventure (even one made primarily for kids) needs: a real sense of danger.

It didn’t need to be this way, surely. The opening scenes show some promise. We first meet the spirited Dr. Lily Houghton (Emily Blunt) as she sneaks around in the back rooms of the Royal Geographic Society, looking for an ancient arrowhead that holds the key to finding a magic, all-healing Amazonian blossom called the Tears of the Moon. But it’s 1916, two years into the Great War, and there’s a sinister German aristocrat — the aforementioned Joachim, who may or may not be Kaiser Wilhelm’s son — also after this artefact.

In his previous works, Collet-Serra proved quite adept playing with screen geography, and he brings charm and energy to these early scenes of Lily maneuvering around this place while Joachim pursues her, each of them using the various objects around them. Similarly, when we meet Frank “Skipper” Wolff (Johnson), the captain of a decaying, rickety Amazon riverboat, we see him conning tourists into seeing fake sights such as a phony giant hippo, a rickety waterfall, and a group of supposedly savage natives whom he’s secretly paid off to scare the foreigners.

There’s a Rube Goldbergian verve to these early sequences, and by the time Lily and her brother MacGregor (Jack Whitehall) have employed Frank to take them into the heart of the Amazon, you might be fooled into thinking that Jungle Cruise is poised to recapture the swashbuckling magic of classics like Raiders of the Lost Ark , The Mask of Zorro , the 1999 iteration of The Mummy , or the original Pirates of the Caribbean , with a little African Queen thrown in. It certainly liberally borrows from just about all of them.

But such films were also not afraid to scare us, to make us care about their characters by putting them in real danger. And here, Jungle Cruise sadly falls back on its corporate theme-park origins. It’s a safety-first kind of movie, seemingly too afraid to ever make us fear for our heroes. A jaguar that attacks early on quickly turns out to be Frank’s pet, Proxima (another aide in his many scams). It would probably constitute a spoiler to give more details about other elements that are initially presented as sources of fear but turn out ultimately to be harmless. (Even the supposedly psychopathic Prince Joachim comes off as weirdly cuddly at times, with Plemons playing him as a subdued bore. Why exactly is this movie set during WWI anyway? Were they afraid to make Joachim a Nazi?) It feels at times like the filmmakers are reluctant to suggest that the Amazon might actually be a dangerous place. Maybe that sort of thing makes for admirable messaging (does it?), but it certainly doesn’t quicken the pulse.

The exception to all this winds up proving the rule: When the aforementioned Lope de Aguirre (Edgar Ramirez) and his men, who all supposedly vanished upriver in the 16th century, come back as a ragtag supernatural phantom army to fight our heroes, they’re clearly meant to provide the menace that the film has been so lacking. And to be fair, a flashback to how they got their curse is one of the film’s highlights; if nothing else, it gives Collet-Serra an opportunity to briefly show off his horror chops. But once these villains enter the story, their presence, even in its finer details and twists, so recalls the far-superior Pirates of the Caribbean that we might wonder if we’re just watching something created on the same software as that earlier picture, only with a different set of features selected from the drop-down menus.

Even so, derivativeness and predictability aren’t always fatal flaws. Jungle Cruise could have been saved had it at least provided some decent comedy and romance. On the latter front, Johnson and Blunt don’t have much chemistry. The film has a good idea in positioning them as opposing temperaments — the more bickering, the more chance of a spark, cinematically speaking — but even that winds up being half-baked. In the end, they don’t argue all that much.

Over and over, we can see the far superior movie Jungle Cruise wants to be: a freewheeling, romantic, swashbuckling epic about a couple of beautiful, brave souls who bicker their way into each other’s hearts, all the while facing off against the many dangers of the jungle and a variety of villains both human and supernatural. But it is so not that movie. And the clarity of its aspirations just makes the film’s downfall that much more pathetic, like a baseball player pointing to the home run he’s about to hit and then completely whiffing and landing on his ass.

Meanwhile, Whitehall is given the thankless task of portraying what is supposedly Disney’s most “out” gay character yet. The film still plays it kind of coy: Talking to Frank one night about how he couldn’t get married, MacGregor says that he “had to tell the lady in question that I couldn’t accept the offer — or indeed any offer, given that my interests happily lay elsewhere.” He then adds, “Uncle threatened to disinherit me. Friends and family turned their backs, all because of who I love.” Maybe this could have been a touching character note, but it doesn’t actually do much to develop MacGregor; his confession seems to exist primarily to show what a decent guy Frank is in accepting him. MacGregor, meanwhile, remains the butt of many of the movie’s (mostly unfunny) jokes — a hopelessly vain dandy who pees himself at the first sign of danger. I’m not sure any of this is progress. The jungle might not kill you, but Jungle Cruise could kill your soul.

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‘Jungle Cruise’ Review: Amazon Subprime

Not even Emily Blunt, doing her best Katharine Hepburn impression, can keep this leaky boat ride afloat.

Share full article

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Like Vogon poetry , the plot of Disney’s “Jungle Cruise” is mostly unintelligible and wants to beat you into submission. Manically directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, this latest derivation of a theme-park ride shoots for the fizzy fun of bygone romantic adventures like “ Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981) . That it misses has less to do with the heroic efforts of its female lead than with the glinting artifice of the entire enterprise.

Emily Blunt plays Lily, a sassy British botanist weary of being disrespected by London’s chauvinistic scientific community. The Great War is in full swing, but Lily is obsessed with reaching the Amazon jungle to search for a flower that’s rumored to cure all ills. A roguish riverboat captain named Frank (Dwayne Johnson) is hired, and soon Lily and her fussy brother (Jack Whitehall) — whose discomfort with all things Amazonian is a running gag — are heading upriver into a host of digital dangers.

As snakes, cannibals and maggoty supernatural beings rattle around the frame, “Jungle Cruise” exhibits a blatantly faux exoticism that feels as flat as the forced frisson between its two leads. The pace is hectic, the dialogue boilerplate (“The natives speak of this place with dread”), the general busyness a desperate dance for our attention. Jesse Plemons is briefly diverting as a nefarious German prince, and Edgar Ramírez pops up as a rotting Spanish conquistador named Aguirre. Werner Herzog must be thrilled.

Buffeted by a relentless score and supported by a small town’s worth of digital artists, “Jungle Cruise” is less directed than whipped to a stiff peak before collapsing into a soggy mess.

“Everything you see wants to kill you,” Frank tells his passengers. Actually, I think it just wants to take your money.

Jungle Cruise Rated PG-13 for chaste kissing and bloodless fighting. Running time 2 hours 7 minutes. In theaters and on Disney+ .

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‘Jungle Cruise’: The Rock and Emily Blunt Go Up the Disney River, Without a Paddle

By David Fear

Blame Johnny Depp.

I mean, listen, feel free to blame the actor for any number of things , if you want. But specifically, in terms of riot-act reading, let’s go back to 2003, when Mr. Depp slapped on a head scarf, trotted out his best Keef Richards wobble and slur, and turned what felt like a Disney Hail-Mary I.P. cash-in into a cash cow. No one expected a movie based on an amusement park ride based on creaky, age-old seafaring stories to give birth to a popular franchise; no one expected a movie about 18th century pirates to show up in the early part of the 21st century, period. (What is this, the Watchmen universe ?)

Depp is responsible for turning the Pirates of the Caribbean films into hits, even when the series slipped into diminishing-returns territory. More importantly, he helped to prove a Mouse House theorem: When it comes to licensing, exploiting and rebooting, why stop at your best-known characters? Find the right actor, and you can sell your park properties’ greatest hits as intellectual properties too. If you can hire a better-than-decent director and keep the pace frantic, all the better. The movies then direct customers back to the park, and the circle of l̶i̶f̶e̶ commerce continues. The question was not whether this was the beginning of a trend but what the next “title” would be and how soon we’d be E-ticketing to a theater near us.

The reprieve lasted longer than we thought, enough to lull us into a false sense of security. Maybe it’s unfair to blame the ghost of Jack Sparrow and the Pirates boom-bust of yore for Jungle Cruise . But dear Walt in the heavens, the shadow of that series looms large over this attempt to sell the Magic Kingdom’s vintage, colonialism-a-go-go boat ride as the next big endless-summer-movie thing. To be fair, so too does the specter of the Indiana Jones films, The African Queen, steampunk, old-school Werner Herzog, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling, Jules Verne, the entire previous filmography of the Rock, that book on Ponce de Leon you forgot to return to your library in fourth grade and every boys’ adventure ever written. Still: the wisecracking, trickster rascal? The hyper-capable and social-sexism-thwarting heroine? The mystical, supernatural villains, and their imperialistic, human bad-guy counterpart? The set pieces that update bits of ye olde derring-do, often digitally and occasionally successfully? You’ve seen this film. Only the hats, the source material’s location in the park and the size of the biceps have changed.

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Stream Jungle Cruise on Disney+

First, your lovable scamp of a skipper: His name is Frank Wolff, but feel free to call him Dwayne Johnson. This is a great example of what a movie star, a real one, does when you hire them: gives you their screen persona and molds it to fit the container without changing the essential recipe. It’s the one big difference between this and other Disney’s other big cinéma du amusement park entry, in that Depp injected everything an odd sense of unpredictability and Johnson gives us the reassuring feeling we’re watching a Dwayne Johnson movie. Except this time, it happens to be 1916, we’re deep in the Brazilian rain forests, and the star is smiling instead of seriously scowling. Wolff is a tour guide who runs his trusty boat up and down the Amazon for gullible tourists, which — yup — is distinguished by the captain’s facepalm-inspiring banter. Maybe you forgot for a nanosecond that the movie is based on the ride distinguished by a running commentary of puns ranging from bad to very bad to “make it stop, make it stop!!” Anyone who’s been to Disneyland in the past 50 years will recognize the jokes Johnson tells to his hostages (sorry, “customers”). The meta-gag is that even folks in 1916 thought these groaners were god-awful.

Meanwhile, in Merry Olde England, a young man named MacGregor Houghton (Jack Whitehall) is making a plea to ye olde stuffy historical organization to let him access an arrowhead recently found in the Amazon. This artifact, about to be tucked away in their archives, is allegedly the key to unlocking “the Tears of the Moon” — bright flowers found blossoming only on the mystical Tree of Life, and the obsession/downfall of Spanish conquistador Don Lope de Aguirre (Edgar Ramírez). He’s not the Houghton to keep an eye on, however: That would be MacGregor’s sister, Lily ( Emily Blunt ), the headstrong adventurer of the family. She’s keen to prove that the rumors surrounding the magical healing properties of this foliage are true, and thus cure all ills. Yet another party, Germany’s Prince Joachim (Jesse Plemons), would also like the arrowhead. There’s a world war going, you see. Having access to the tree’s bounty might give his nation the winning edge.

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Dwayne johnson and emily blunt in ‘jungle cruise’: film review.

The perennial Disneyland theme park ride goes the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' route with Jaume Collet-Serra's big-screen adventure, in which Amazon explorers encounter threats both human and supernatural.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Of all the longtime favorite rides of the Disneyland theme parks, the Jungle Cruise , introduced in 1955, is among the most enduringly captivating. Sailing on a 1930s British steamer down the major rivers of Southeast Asia, Africa and South America through lush vegetation, accompanied by a skipper with a weakness for bad puns while Audio-Animatronic animals pop up in the waterways or on the riverbanks, the quaint Adventureland attraction is the very definition of transporting. Those central elements survive in Disney’s big-screen offshoot, though just barely, given the writers’ assiduous efforts to drown them in overplotting.

Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra is usually found putting Liam Neeson through his B-movie action-man paces, or, more memorably, pitting Blake Lively against a pesky shark in The Shallows . But family-friendly humor isn’t quite his strong point, and the absence of a light touch here means that even the teasing banter and sexual tension between appealing leads Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt is a bit stiff. By the time they start wrestling with 400-year-old undead conquistadors and an evil spawn of the German kaiser who navigates the Amazon in a submarine, you probably won’t much care if they find the elusive object of their expedition, let alone seal it with a kiss.

Full credits

Distributor: Disney/Disney+ Production companies: David Entertainment Company, Seven Bucks, Flynn Picture Co. Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Edgar Ramirez, Jack Whitehall, Jesse Plemons, Paul Giamatti, Veronica Falcón, Dani Rovira, Quim Gutiérrez Director: Jaume Collet-Serra Screenwriters: Michael Green, Glenn Ficarra, John Requa; story by John Norville, Josh Goldstein, Ficarra, Requa Producers: John Davis, John Fox, Beau Flynn, Dwayne Johnson, Dany Garcia, Hiram Garcia Executive producers: Scott Sheldon, Doug Merrifield Director of photography: Flavio Labiano Production designer: Jean-Vincent Puzos Costume designer: Paco Delgado Music: James Newton Howard Editor: Joel Negron Visual effects supervisors: Jim Berney, Jake Morrison Casting: Mary Vernieu, Marisol Roncali

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In “ Jungle Cruise ,” a Disney adventure that demonstrates how basing a movie on a theme-park ride may now be a more natural occurence than adapting it from a novel, Emily Blunt plays Dr. Lily Houghton, a London researcher-explorer who’s as fearless, in her demure way, as Indiana Jones, and Dwayne Johnson is Frank Wolff, the friendly huckster of a river-boat captain who ferries her down the Amazon at the height of World War I.

He wears a hat just like the one Humphrey Bogart wore in “The African Queen,” and she wears pants — which, of course, were an early adaptation of Katharine Hepburn’s. For anyone old enough, or old-movie-centered enough, to care (which is maybe five percent of this movie’s prospective audience), the banter between these two could be said to evoke Bogart and Hepburn — or, at least, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in “Romancing the Stone.” Frank, a charlatan with a chip on his shoulder, calls Lily “Pants” and tells godawful jokes. She call him “Skippy” and rolls her eyes. And as they go at each other with gusto and bite and a touch of venom, you can sit back and feel, at moments, like you’re at a romantic comedy.

But it’s like watching a romantic comedy while strapped to a roller-coaster with a VR headset on. “Jungle Cruise” is at once a love story, a made-for-4DX action movie, a “Pirates of the Caribbean”-style fairy tale featuring a ghostly conquistador (Edgar Ramirez) and his pewter-armored henchman with digital snakes slithering through their bodies, and God knows what else. Blunt, appealingly brash, makes mincemeat of Frank the lug but lets you know she likes him anyway, and Johnson knows how to deliver a genial putdown that still stings. They’ve got a chemistry, no doubt about it, but in a funny way the romantic pluck of “Jungle Cruise” plays like one more trick effect. You can practically touch the one-liners as they ping off the screen.

I enjoyed the movie more than I did the two recent “Jumanji” films, because you can kind of pretend that there’s something at stake, and the director, Jaume Collet-Serra, stages it all with a certain breathless bravura. Leaving the dock in the Brazilian jungle where Frank plays P.T. Barnum to gullible tourists, our heroes set off in his barely seaworthy steamboat, only to have to get out of the way of a torpedo launched by Prince Joachim, a Teutonic megalomaniac played by Jesse Plemons with a smirky flourish. The ship plows right into Frank’s docking station, which blows up real good.

There’s a turbulent sequence in which the boat speeds toward a waterfall, and a funny one that fools us into thinking, for a moment, that the movie is going to exploit the woefully outdated stereotype of a “primitive” tribe of cannibals wearing skull masks. (It’s actually mocking it.) Lily has brought her brother, MacGregor, along for the ride, and he’s a pampered dandy who think it’s not dinner unless you’re wearing a dinner jacket. He’s played by Jack Whitehall, in a pinpoint performance that benefits from not having to repress the implication that the character is gay, though it might have benefited even more if his coming-out speech to Frank didn’t dance around the subject nearly as torturously as the old repression.

“Jungle Cruise” is a movie that implicitly asks: What’s wrong with a little good old-fashioned escapism? The answer is: Absolutely nothing, and “Jungle Cruise” is old-fashioned, expect that it pelts the audience with entertainment in such a lively yet bumptious way that at times you may wish you were wearing protective gear. Lily has in her possession a mystical arrowhead, which everyone wants, because it’s the totem that will lead her to the Tears of the Moon, a legendary tree (it’s like the Fountain of Youth) with magical healing properties. That sounds like a Disney MacGuffin, and is, except what struck me after a while is that the real preoccupation of “Jungle Cruise” isn’t romance, or even adventure, but metamorphosis. Tree vines grow and wrap themselves around historic explorers; a fearsome tiger is revealed to be a pussycat; a key character turns out to be 400 years old; a theme-park ride turns into a love story and then back again. All that remains unchanged is the price of an oversize box of Raisinets.

Reviewed at AMC Lincoln Square, New York, July 26, 2021. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 127 MIN.

Production: A Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures release of a Davis Entertainment Company, Seven Bucks/Flynn Picture Co. production. Producers: John Davis, John Fox, Beau Flynn, Dwayne Johnson, Dany Garcia, Hiram Garcia. Executive producers: Scott Sheldon, Doug Merrifield.
Crew: Director: Jaume Collet-Serra. Screenplay: Michael Green, Glenn Ficarra, John Requa. Camera: Flavio Labiano. Editor: Joel Negron. Music: James Newton Howard.
With: Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Édgar Ramírez, Jack Whitehall, Jesse Plemons, Paul Giamatti, Veronica Falcón, Dani Rovira, Quim Gutierrez.

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Jungle cruise, common sense media reviewers.

Ride-based adventure is fun, if predictable; peril, scares.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Promotes courage, perseverance, teamwork. Characte

Lily is a pioneering botanist and adventurer -- a

Frequent peril/tension, action violence, physical

Lily and Frank banter and flirt, eventually sharin

"Oh my God," "ruddy," "fresh hell," "crusty old fa

This movie is based on/promotes a Disney ride. Lot

Adults drink in taverns, where some background cha

Positive Messages

Promotes courage, perseverance, teamwork. Characters work together and think creatively to defeat a curse, vengeful enemies, a sociopathic villain. Characters' stories/journeys promote idea of personal growth and value of acceptance and living a nontraditional life. You don't have to be what everyone expects you to be.

Positive Role Models

Lily is a pioneering botanist and adventurer -- a Ph.D. who's never afraid of being the only woman in a room. She's brave, smart, resourceful, goes after what she wants (often bending rules to do so). Frank is knowledgeable, protective. Both are willing to put themselves in danger for their missions -- and each other. MacGregor is a dedicated brother who accompanies and supports Lily; he implies but never says outright that she was the only person who stuck by him when he realized he was gay. Native Amazonians are initially portrayed as cannibal warriors out to capture (and eat) foreigners, but ( spoiler alert ) it turns out to be for show. Still, the story exploits those stereotypes and certain others (MacGregor is fussy and high maintenance, Joachim is cartoonishly German, etc.), and Joachim's accent is played for humor.

Violence & Scariness

Frequent peril/tension, action violence, physical comedy, creepy imagery -- including conquistadores being turned to stone or coming back to "life" while made of bees, snakes, etc. Native Amazonians are killed, a villain is squashed. At one point, it's suggested that a key character has died. People get abducted, slapped, stabbed, bitten by snakes and piranhas, threatened/attacked by a jaguar. Falls, chases, explosions. Torpedo and guns fired, swords and knives brandished. A villain callously smashes bees. Amazonians are described as cannibals, but ( spoiler alert ) it's just for show. Arguments/yelling.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Lily and Frank banter and flirt, eventually sharing longing looks. Characters share a kiss. A conversation about extracting a knife borders on suggestive.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

"Oh my God," "ruddy," "fresh hell," "crusty old farts," "shove it up your association," "booga booga," "wimpy," etc.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

This movie is based on/promotes a Disney ride. Lots of merchandise tie-ins off camera.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adults drink in taverns, where some background characters seem to be drinking heavily. Characters drink whiskey from a flask, liquor from bottles. A jaguar drinks spilled wine, gets tipsy. MacGregor brings an entire suitcase of liquor on board.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Jungle Cruise is an action-fantasy adventure inspired by the classic Disneyland ride. Set in 1916, it follows intrepid Dr. Lily Houghton ( Emily Blunt ), who hires skipper Frank Wolff ( Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson ) to guide her and her brother down the Amazon River in search of a mythical healing tree. Violence and peril are the biggest issues: Expect frequent danger, creepy cursed villains (as well as a cartoonishly evil German baddie), weapons (guns, torpedoes, swords, knives), an implied significant death (and some actual less significant ones), threatening snakes, and a jaguar that looks more vicious than she actually is. Adult characters drink from flasks and bottles, and an animal gets tipsy. One conversation about removing a knife from someone's body could be perceived as suggestive (though the double meaning will likely go over kids' heads), and there's some flirty banter and a couple of kisses. Without saying it outright, one character comes out to another, who's supportive. While main characters demonstrate impressive courage, perseverance, and teamwork, the movie's initial depiction of Native Amazonians as a tribe of angry cannibals is concerning, even though ( spoiler alert ) it turns out it's largely for show. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

Parents say (35)
Kids say (66)

Based on 35 parent reviews

Turn it off about an hour in...

Action and adventure, what's the story.

Set in 1916, JUNGLE CRUISE opens with bold botanist Dr. Lily Houghton ( Emily Blunt ) stealing an Amazonian arrowhead from an elite -- and anti-woman -- British explorers' club. The artifact is supposed to lead Houghton to a mysterious location on the Amazon River where legendary healing flowers bloom on an ancient tree. Lily and her brother, MacGregor ( Jack Whitehall ), head to the Amazon and hire brash skipper Frank Wolff ( Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson ) to guide them on the perilous river trip. Along the way, Lily and Frank must avoid not only the natural dangers of the Amazon but also a villainous German prince ( Jesse Plemons ) who's also searching for the tree, as well as a group of Spanish conquistadores who need the flower's petals to reverse their immortal curse.

Is It Any Good?

The irresistibly charming stars help make this adventurous, occasionally swashbuckling ride adaptation amusing, if not as memorable as The Mummy or Pirates of the Caribbean . Johnson can make nearly any character likable; here, Frank's silly, punny jokes are also a fun nod to the Disney ride's vibe. Blunt, likewise, is ideally cast as the pioneering Dr. Houghton. Lily bucks social mores of the time by having a job and a Ph.D., knowing how to defend herself, and even wearing trousers (Frank calls her "Pants"). She also has a refreshingly close relationship with her brother, who's posh and fussy but is still willing to follow her into murky, life-threatening situations. Other members of the cast are underused -- like Paul Giamatti as a local riverboat mogul and Edgar Ramirez as head conquistador Aguirre -- or they overact, like Plemons' caricature of a sociopathic German villain, Prince Joachim.

The movie's landscaping and production art are vibrant and immersive, and director Jaume Collet-Serra should be applauded for making sure to organically include themes of gender, class, and discrimination against the Amazonian natives -- without being preachy. Still, the movie's portrayal of those natives is a bit cringey, even if the movie course-corrects to subvert the same stereotypes it initially seems to be perpetuating. Luckily, Blunt and Johnson cheerfully elevate the story enough to make audiences gloss over some of the screenplay's missteps and enjoy the ride.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the level of violence in Jungle Cruise . Does stylized or fantasy violence impact viewers differently than more realistic violence?

How do Lily's actions convey that she is both brave and smart? Do you consider her a role model ? What character strengths does she demonstrate?

How is drinking depicted in the movie? Are there consequences for any character's drinking? Why does that matter?

Did you notice any stereotypes in the film? Why is the initial depiction of the Native Amazonians problematic? Is it excused by the fact that the tribe is in on the joke/plan?

Movie Details

In theaters : July 30, 2021
On DVD or streaming : November 12, 2021
Cast : Emily Blunt , Dwayne Johnson , Edgar Ramirez , Jack Whitehall
Director : Jaume Collet-Serra
Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors, Polynesian/Pacific Islander actors, Latino actors
Studio : Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Genre : Action/Adventure
Topics : Magic and Fantasy , Adventures , Brothers and Sisters
Character Strengths : Courage , Perseverance , Teamwork
Run time : 127 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : sequences of adventure violence
Last updated : February 19, 2023

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Jungle Cruise Review

24 Jul 2020

Jungle Cruise

Sometimes, it’s not the reboots and remakes that make you despair of Hollywood’s lack of originality. Sometimes it’s a theoretically original film like this, another attempt to turn a Disneyland ride into a big-screen franchise. As you watch Jaume Collet-Serra ’s adventure, you’re haunted by the unpleasant feeling that this is a supposedly fun thing that’s already been done before. It’s only thanks to Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt that the result holds the attention, and it’s a credit to them that it’s entertaining at all.

The ride that inspired this is a slightly insipid glide past animatronic animals. For the big screen we’re in the Amazon in 1916, where Captain Frank (Johnson) is engaged to take scientist Lily (Blunt) on a hunt for “ el flor de la luna ”, a mythical flower that can cure all ills. Her brother MacGregor ( Jack Whitehall , about whom the less said the better) is along for the ride as they follow in the footsteps of conquistador Aguirre ( Edgar Ramirez ).

It’s not badly done by any means, yet it's deathly derivative.

If you enjoyed Rachel Weisz’s plucky librarian in The Mummy , you’ll love Blunt’s plucky scientist, also tottering about on a library ladder and railing against the sexist scholars who won’t grant her the academic recognition she deserves. Johnson’s scoundrel captain, meanwhile, may recall a certain Corellian smuggler, or a Caribbean pirate. He shares a loose moral sense with both, drives a beaten-up craft that he claims is the fastest in the sector, and is in hock to a rich local boss ( Paul Giamatti , wasted). And it’s a shame that Ramirez’s Aguirre doesn’t draw from Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski to add some demented intensity, because those flashbacks play more like a limp Pirates Of The Caribbean .

It’s not badly done by any means, with lovely animal effects, big, well-staged chases and lots of antics for Blunt and Johnson. Yet it’s deathly derivative. Action beats are lifted from Raiders Of The Lost Ark , music comes (mystifyingly) courtesy of Metallica (in collaboration with composer James Newton Howard), and there are endless references to The Mummy . Orphan filmmaker Collet-Serra manages to inject some nuance into the portrayal of an Amazonian populace, led by Veronica Falcón’s Trader Sam, and gives Jesse Plemons an entertainingly outrageous accent as a German princeling. The script even pulls off a surprise or two — though one of those, involving Whitehall’s character, is horribly misconceived.

But with a budget this big and a crew this talented, the film shouldn’t be this reliant on Blunt and Johnson’s bickering to hold the attention. In his fourth jungle outing (after Welcome To The… , Journey 2 and Jumanji ), His Rockness gives good world-weary, and Blunt’s bossiness sparks off him nicely, in a dynamic straight out of The African Queen . They don’t have much romantic chemistry but they do make for a fun odd couple, and at times they’re the only thing stopping you from throwing yourself to the piranhas. When did on-screen adventure start to feel so planned?

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Jungle Cruise review – the Rock’s Disney theme-park actioner takes predictable turns

Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson are romancing riverboat adventurers in a ride-turned-film that quickly becomes bland

T he Jungle Cruise theme-park ride is a riverboat trip that Disneyland visitors have been queuing up for since the 1950s: an old-timey craft travelling down an artificial jungle river, with a jolly captain pointing out animatronic animals lurching out of the artificial undergrowth. Now it’s been adapted into a blandly inoffensive piece of generic entertainment: screenwriters Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (who once gave us Bad Santa and I Love You Phillip Morris) have mashed up The African Queen with Raiders of the Lost Ark, and with what I admit is a surreal splash of Aguirre, Wrath of God.

It’s lively enough for the first 20 minutes. The year is 1916, and Emily Blunt plays Lily Houghton, a haughty yet idealistic British scientist, much patronised by the male establishment in London. She imperiously hires a riverboat in Brazil to find the much-rumoured “Tree of Life” somewhere in the jungle. Its captain is a cynical-with-a-heart-of-gold rogue called Frank Wolff, man-mountainishly played by Dwayne Johnson. After the traditional meet-cute, their growing romance plays off the comedy turn provided by Jack Whitehall, playing the other passenger: Lily’s foppish, neurotic younger brother MacGregor. At one stage, Whitehall’s prissy, wussy Englishman explains to Dwayne Johnson that he is gay – or rather, he says something indirect about being not as other men, and the subject is never raised again, Edwardian reticence dovetailing nicely with Disney family values. It is a stereotype that Walt himself might have recognised, while also approving of the obvious heterosexuality of Frank with his muscles, boots and sailor’s cap.

The trio encounter all sorts of shrink-wrapped CGI Disney adventures, facing off against evil German nobleman Prince Joachim (Jesse Plemons) who wants the Tree of Life’s powers to boost the German army, and the ghostly Aguirre (Edgar Ramírez) who went searching for it in the 16th century. The spark that was there in the opening section disappears and the film splutters out into something directionless and derivative and dull.

Action and adventure films
Dwayne Johnson (The Rock)
Emily Blunt
Period and historical films
Romance films
Theme parks

Review: Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt are fun, but not enough to make ‘Jungle Cruise’ see-worthy

A man in suspenders and a cap, left, and a woman stand on a boat on a muddy river

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The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local health officials .

Starting this Friday, if you’re willing to spend the time (a little more than two hours) and money (either the price of a theater ticket or a $29.99 Disney+ Premier Access fee), you can watch the new “Jungle Cruise” movie, a technologically newfangled, dramatically old-fashioned action-adventure inspired by the long-running Disney theme-park ride. Alternately, in much less time (eight minutes) and for no money at all, you could watch a video recording of said theme-park ride on YouTube.

I don’t mean to suggest that these are equivalent experiences exactly. Personally I prefer the YouTube version, which may have been filmed in a giant Anaheim water tank festooned with imported plants and mechanical elephants, yet still somehow manages to offer up the less artificial, more persuasively inhabited jungle scenery of the two. Enthusiasts of Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt and the color orange, however, will probably want to spring for the longer, shinier, digitally enhanced version, perhaps hoping that, like Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies — the first one , anyway — it will succeed in turning a slow-moving boat ride into an energetic, nostalgia-tickling cinematic diversion.

And to be sure, this “Jungle Cruise,” serviceably directed by Jaume Collet-Serra ( “The Shallows” ), does reproduce some of the ride’s signature pleasures in elaborate computer-generated form: the leafy overgrowth, the exotic wildlife, the gently flowing stream. By that I also mean the stream of puns rattled off by the skipper, who is played by Johnson. That he represents an upgrade over the average Disney park employee — no offense, average Disney park employee — is hard to deny. And whether you’re wordplay-averse or (like me) think the whole enterprise should have been retitled “Pungle Cruise,” the mischievous wit that has always undergirded Johnson’s brawny physicality serves him well in this department. What a dorky, deadpan delight to hear him say things like “toucan play that game” or point out that certain rocks are “taken for granite.” (Certain Rocks too, surely.)

A man in suspenders and a cap, right, looks forward while a man and a woman look at him

Being a full-length feature, of course, “Jungle Cruise” does have to traffic in niceties like plot, character and mythology, even if the result, scripted by Michael Green, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, is derivative to the point of desultory. Johnson is Frank, the wily captain of a rickety Amazon River tourist trap, trying to eke out a semi-honest living amid stiff competition from a local bigwig (Paul Giamatti). Blunt plays Frank’s latest passenger, Lily Houghton, an apt name for a high-minded English botanist who’s trying to find the “Tears of the Moon,” a legendary flower known for its astonishing healing powers. Fate brings these two singularly stubborn individuals together for a long and bickersome journey downriver, pitting Frank’s cynical self-interest against Lily’s naive idealism and pairing Blunt’s reliably withering eye rolls with Johnson’s famously expressive eyebrows.

The chemistry generated by all this ocular sparring is not negligible, and it powers this waterlogged star vehicle through its busy, semicoherent action sequences and squalls of narrative incident. It’s 1916 and World War I is raging, which at least partly explains Jesse Plemons’ over-the-top turn as Prince Joachim, a mustachioed German villain who will butcher any person or vowel that stands in his way. He’s determined to harvest the Tears of the Moon before Lily does, even if it means steering a U-boat down the Amazon in hot pursuit. And hot is the operative word, given the sweltering Brazilian temperatures, hinted at by the oppressive ochre tones of Flavio Labiano’s digital cinematography and the sweat beads you can practically see clinging to Paco Delgado’s costumes.

Speaking of which: Also along for the ride is Lily’s brother, MacGregor (Jack Whitehall), who has dapper tastes, packs way too many suitcases and, as the movie seldom tires of reminding us, is comically ill equipped for any kind of rugged living or heterosexual entanglement. But worry not: Once it’s done poking fun at an effeminate male stereotype, the script swoops in with a cautious coming-out monologue perfectly tailored to generate a fresh round of headlines celebrating and/or criticizing Disney’s latest LGBTQ milestone. This being Disney, of course, we’re quite a long way from, say, the family-unfriendly subversions of “I Love You Phillip Morris,” Ficarra and Requa’s joyous 2010 comedy of queer awakening. Even within these ostensibly punny parameters, the only jungle cruising that goes on here is all too literal.

People in tribal garb dance in a line surrounded by fire torches

Still, MacGregor’s blip of a backstory isn’t the only instance in which this early 20th century epic nods to a decidedly 21st century audience. As my Times colleague Todd Martens recently examined in a thoughtful, deeply reported piece , the Jungle Cruise ride, a Disneyland fixture since the park opened in 1955, recently underwent a significant overhaul that jettisoned its racist depictions of Indigenous people. The movie, through some clever tinkering, accomplishes something similar, turning its gallery of spear-brandishing headhunters into a sly joke at the expense of Western colonialist assumptions. The real villains here are Plemons’ power-hungry prince and his army of undead Spanish conquistadors, one of whom (played by Édgar Ramirez) is none other than Aguirre himself. That historical nod conjures some wishful Herzogian overtones in a movie otherwise conceived under the spell of “The African Queen” (itself a design influence on the original ride), Indiana Jones, “Romancing the Stone” and other films from an earlier era of cinematic adventure seeking.

To watch those films again may be to plunge back into a world of cheap jokes and retrograde attitudes. But it’s also to be reminded of what mainstream American movies looked like before the era of wall-to-wall visual effects, the kind that’ve turned the modern blockbuster into a shiny, increasingly soulless and sometimes flat-out ugly proposition. “Romancing the Stone” had live snakes and snapping alligators and an appreciably real sense of peril; this movie has a digitally fabricated jaguar, among other computer-generated creepy-crawlies, and not a real thrill or scare among them. “Jungle Cruise,” despite its more-than-capable leads and its much-vaunted attention to detail and verisimilitude, never feels transporting in the way that even mediocre blockbusters were once able to muster. It’s less an expedition than a simulation, a dispatch from a wild yet oddly pristine world where seeing is never close to believing.

‘Jungle Cruise’

Rating: PG-13, for sequences of adventure violence Running time: 2 hours, 7 minutes Playing: Starts July 30 in general release; also available as PVOD on Disney+

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DVD & Streaming

Jungle Cruise

Action/Adventure , Comedy , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

In Theaters

July 30, 2021
Dwayne Johnson as Frank Wolff; Emily Blunt as Lily Houghton; Jack Whitehall as MacGregor Houghton; Edgar Ramírez as Aguirre; Jesse Plemons as Prince Joachim; Paul Giamatti as Nilo; Veronica Falcón as Trader Sam

Home Release Date

Jaume Collet-Serra

Distributor

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Movie Review

Conquistadors were suckers for a good legend.

They scoured the New World looking for El Dorado. They discovered Florida seeking the Fountain of Youth. And one intrepid Spaniard—a fellow named Aguirre—even dared brave the mighty Amazon in search of the Tears of the Moon, petals from a hidden tree that would supposedly cure any disease.

Those petals would’ve been nice, given all the diseases that Conquistadors introduced to the New World, but no matter. Aguirre and his cohorts disappeared in those Brazilian jungles long ago, and the Tears of the Moon faded into barely remembered myth—a bedtime story for a few, perhaps, but nothing more.

But Lily Houghton and her brother, MacGregor, heard those bedtime stories and believed . And Lily believes something else, too: That she can succeed where Aguirre and everyone else has failed.

And given that the year’s 1916—the middle of the Great War, when millions of people are dying from battle and disease—the Tears have never been more needed.

Lily has maps of important twisty, turny Amazon tributaries—maps allegedly made by Aguirre’s own cartographer. Soon she has an important arrowhead, too, which she thinks may be the key to unlocking the Tears’ centuries-old secret. Now all she and her brother need is a boat captain to take them upriver, through the mysterious and perilous jungle. Someone brave. Strong. Honest.

Well, two out of three ain’t bad.

Frank Wolff isn’t honest. In fact, he makes his living lying. He takes gullible tourists upriver and shows them the (ahem) wonders and terrors of the Amazon, be they fearsome headhunters (actors in Frank’s employ) or horrifying hippopotami (not native to Brazil) or the skeletonized remains of dead conquistadors (well, the skeletons look real enough). He glories in terrible puns and proudly shows his guests the “eighth wonder of the world”—a pitiful little manmade waterfall that Frank sails behind. “The backside of water!” he proudly exclaims to his less-than-impressed clientele.

Why, when he first meets Lily, Frank is even lying about being Frank . She finds him in the office of another (much more successful) riverboat captain, apparently picking a lock. She mistakes him for the (much more successful) riverboat captain, and who is Frank to say otherwise?

Still, Frank is roughly the size of a boat himself, which suggests he’s strong. He must be brave, too, living as he does in this little-explored jungle. And he works cheap.

But the dangers Frank, Lily and MacGregor face are no lie. To get to where the Tears of the Moon supposedly can be found, they’ll have to brave wild animals, fearsome rapids and maybe even a German U-Boat or two.

And the deep, dark jungle hides a secret, as well. Those old, lost conquistadors might not be quite dead yet. Yes, the Tears of the Moon make a tantilizing bedtime story—one that Lily banks on being much more. But before this jungle cruise is over, she might be shedding a few tears of her own.

Positive Elements

Lily wants to find the Tears of the Moon for a whole bunch of reasons: To redeem her family name; to mark herself as a scientist of note; and because it’d be fun. But above all, she believes the Tears can save lives—lives that, at this juncture in history, are being lost at a staggering pace. “I don’t have to know someone to care,” she tells Frank.

The riverboat captain respects that. But for him, he needs to be closer to someone to truly care for them—and he’s been looking for that connection for a while now. “One person to care about in this world—that’s enough for me.” Which is also a nice sentiment.

All that caring leads all of them (MacGregor, too) to take risks for each other—even to the point of making the ultimate sacrifice.

In flashback, we also see an indigenous group show great kindness to a handful of conquistadors. And we learn that at least one of those conquistadors sought out the Tears for a pretty good reason of his own.

Spiritual Elements

The Tears themselves were a gift from the gods, it’s suggested, and Frank named his boat after the goddess of the moon (Quilla, an actual Incan deity). The history of the tears is filled with magical happenings and elements, too, including a very effective curse. Part of that curse involves an element of undead immortality. Apart from that, though, there is little apparent hope of an afterlife, but rather eternal rest.

Lily spies some Brazilian dolphins. Frank cautions her to not look them in the eyes: Those dolphins, he says—repeating a real Brazilian legend—are said to be shapeshifters who might just steal you away. “If you believe in legends,” he cautions, “you should believe in curses, too.” Indigenous tribespeople don masks made out of skulls, and the leader has painted an eye on her hand—suggesting an adherence to some sort of mysterious religion.

There’s a reference to the Garden of Eden. It’s said that Lily wants to be the “Darwin of flowers,” a reference to the naturalist who popularized the notion of evolution.

Sexual Content

Before diving into water, Lily strips down to her modest 1916-era skivvies. (“Are you wearing pants under your pants?” Frank asks.) We also see some indiginous folks go shirtless or (in the case of women) shoulder-baring garb. Life-saving, underwater swaps of oxygen resemble a pair of lip-to-lip kisses. Some banter over treating a wound—with Frank asking Lily if it’s her “first time”—is filled with possible light double entendres.

MacGregor, Lily’s brother, is apparently gay. He tells Frank that he had to break the truth to a would-be female match that his “interests lie elsewhere,” and that he would’ve been disinherited and completely ostracized from society for “who I loved,” had it not been for Lily. This is the only reference to MacGregor’s sexual leanings, and it could sail over some younger viewers’ heads. Yet, the context of the conversation might make it more likely that those younger viewers will ask questions later.

Violent Content

The movie opens in earnest in London, where a villain quickly and cartoonishly dispatches a number of bearded scientists. We see no blood, but given the blades involved, there’s no doubt as to the fates of these unfortunates. Someone nearly tumbles to her death during the melee, as well, but instead lands safely on a double-decker bus.

But if London’s a dangerous place, it doesn’t hold a candle to the Amazon. We see creatures nab other creatures, only to get snatched up in turn—the suggestion being that pretty much everything’s subject to being gobbled up and eaten. People are stabbed and shot and nearly drowned, and a couple of unfortunates fall from terrific heights, bouncing off branches and rocks on the way down. Someone is skewered by a pretty nasty blade (we see the end jut out from the other side) but survives—and someone else is forced to pull the blade out. Someone is crushed by a falling rock.

A leopard attacks Frank and bites his wrist. He and the animal wrestle in a bar for a bit (threatened by a nearby tarantula and scorpion, who just minutes before had been locked in an apparent fight-to-the-death). Someone’s foot is seriously injured. A man is thwacked by a golf club. A couple of guys get whacked in their privates (momentarily disabling them). Men burn their hands. People comically run into various hard surfaces, knocking them down or, in one case, plunging from a zip line. People are bitten by snakes, and at least a couple seem to die from the bites. Sunburns look pretty painful. Animals are shot and caught for food. We hear some joking references to beheadings. Piranhas attack Frank.

[ Spoiler Warning ] We should mention those undead conquistadors. They commit plenty of acts of violence, to be sure, but more than that, these guys are just plain scary. Each seems to be cursed as a different jungle avatar: The body of one is alive with slithering snakes, some of which slide out of his skin (which sometimes splits rather grotesquely). Another seems built partly out of honeycombs, with portions of his body missing. If you remember the undead pirates from the Pirates of the Caribbean movie, you can get a sense of the level of ookiness we’re talking about here, but something to be aware of.

Crude or Profane Language

Someone uses the German equivalent of the s-word. We hear one “h—” and about three misuses of God’s name. The movie purposefully calls to mind a harsher profanity, though, when a character rejects an invitation to a prestigious educational body—telling its members that they can “shove it up your association.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

Frank imbibes quite a bit (most likely a nod to Humphry Bogart’s hard-drinking character in The African Queen). He quaffs liquid from a glass flask he always has with him, and he partakes elsewhere, too (ordering, for instance, “two beers and two steaks”). When MacGregor tries to bring seemingly dozens of trunks along, Frank throws most overboard but pointedly keeps the trunk full of liquor.

Frank’s pet leopard laps up some of the alcohol from one of those bottles (wine or port, most likely) and gets drunk. During a visit with an indigenous tribe, MacGregor seems quite impressed with the alcohol they give him, until he learns …

Other Negative Elements

… that the alcohol in question is, in Frank’s words, “fermented spit.”

Three characters (including the leopard) vomit, either on the boat deck or over the rail. Frank tells Lily that she can take a bath in the Amazon itself—slyly mentioning that he warmed it up for her earlier (that is, urinated in its waters). When Lily gets splashed, Frank looks at her trousers and says, “Looks like you wet your pants, Pants (his nickname for her).”

Lots of characters—including the good guys—lie and steal here. Indeed, the arrowhead that Lily needs to complete its quest is snatched from its apparently rightful owners (an act she would frame as one of “liberation”).

The inspiration for Jungle Cruise isn’t found in ancient legend or turn-of-the-century storybook, but rather a ride—the beloved Jungle Cruise ride found at most Disney parks.

The ride itself is considered a classic. It opened along with the original Disneyland way back in 1955, and countless guests line up to experience its charm—the animatronic animals, the wisecracking captains, the “backside of water”—every year. And while it has undergone its share of revisions (redesigning the boats and stripping the scenery of some uncomfortably racist elements), the ride that 7-year-olds experience today isn’t that much different from the ride their parents might’ve loved decades before. You could argue that the Jungle Cruise, the ride, is timeless.

The movie? Not so much.

Paradoxically, it embraces a few truly timeless films: It definitely exhibits a strong Indiana Jones vibe, and the characters Lily and Frank strongly echo (in word and garb) the characters from one of the ride’s big sources of inspiration: The African Queen .

But this Jungle Cruise —despite being set more than a century ago and paying homage to a ride nearly 70 years old—is a product of our secularly moralistic age. It’s concerned with issues that our society is concerned about, from feminism to the environment to LGBTQ issues.

That’s not all bad, of course. But it does stamp Jungle Cruise with a “best buy” date, because what society values shifts as society itself does. The morals culture embraces today may feel retro and even embarrassing 40 years from now. And even in this age, Jungle Cruise can feel a bit proselytizing.

In addition, the movie has more content issues than you might expect. While its pretty innocuous when it comes to skin and sensuality, Jungle Cruise is surprisingly violent and pretty scary. And I’ve not seen so much drinking in a film designed for families since Bogey and Hepburn sailed up the Congo on the African Queen .

The film boasts some delightfully hideous puns and stars a couple of charismatic Disney vets in Emily Blunt and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. It can be fun. But in many ways, Jungle Cruise sails off course. And for some families, some unexpected rapids loom downstream.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Jungle Cruise Parent Guide

This is a thrill ride of a film, packed with fantastical action scenes, charming characters, and suitably detestable villains..

Disney+ and Theaters: Intrepid British explorer Lily Houghton travels to the Amazon in search of a fabled tree with healing powers. Working with ship's captain Frank Wolff, she braves the dangers of the jungle and a determined German submariner.

Release date July 30, 2021

Run Time: 127 minutes

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The guide to our grades, parent movie review by kirsten hawkes.

It’s the middle of World War I and young botanist Lily Houghton (Emily Blunt) is convinced that she can find a way to prevent much of the suffering and death that is ravaging the world. Her late father taught her the legend of the Tears of the Moon, a tree whose flowers have healing powers. If Lily can find the tree, its petals could save countless lives and possibly turn the tide of human history.

Obviously, a prize this great is not easily won. To guide her quest, Lily first steals an ancient artifact covered in mysterious markings that hold the key to finding the tree. With her brother (Macgregor played by Jack Whitehall) in tow, she then sails to Brazil and negotiates with ship’s captain, Frank Wolff (Dwayne Johnson) to take them upriver in his deceptively decrepit vessel. But the trip is perilous because cursed conquistadores haunt the Amazon’s shores, Frank has his own secrets, and an obsessed German prince (Jesse Plemons) is tracking them in his submarine…

Given the genre, it’s no surprise that the movie’s biggest issue is violence. Non-stop, bone-crunching violence. There are countless fistfights and scenes where people are shot at with firearms and are stabbed with swords or knives. Since this is the Amazon, poison darts also make an appearance. But the worst for me are the snakes. Having giant serpents slithering through the jungle is bad enough, but it’s much, much worse when snakes erupt through the skin of one of the conquistadores. This film is filled with jump scares, moments of fantastical violence, and frequent scenes of extreme peril. Not frightening but still disturbing to some viewers, will be the movie’s stereotypical portrayal of the indigenous people in the film. The depictions are often favorable, but they hew to the “noble savage” trope, which is an improvement over more negative stereotypes, but still pigeonholes indigenous characters.

Negatives aside, Jungle Cruise provides teens and adults with an entertaining ride which manages to deliver some positive messages about loyalty and courage and having a meaningful life. Sexual content is minor, despite one scene where the dialogue operates on two levels, one of which has sexual overtones. In addition, MacGregor explains his loyalty to his sister as a reciprocal response to her own steadfast support of him as he faced the challenges of being gay in that era. Homosexuality is never mentioned but the point is clear. Whether or not you consider this scene a plus depends on your own sexual ethics.

For Disney, Jungle Cruise is a thrill-ride of a film that will fill its coffers and keep viewers thinking of the titular theme park ride, which is now being refurbished to remove the egregious racism. Given the mutually beneficial relationship between the Pirates of the Caribbean ride and the films it spawned, I predict the same kind of relationship here. Be prepared for plenty of sequels. They’re even harder to kill than cursed conquistadores.

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Kirsten hawkes, watch the trailer for jungle cruise.

Jungle Cruise Rating & Content Info

Why is Jungle Cruise rated PG-13? Jungle Cruise is rated PG-13 by the MPAA for sequences of adventure violence

Violence: Fistfights occur throughout the movie. There are also scenes where weapons are used – firearms, swords, knives, and poison darts. A torpedo is even fired in one scene, causing significant destruction. Main characters are shown dead and injured. A man is crushed when part of a stone building falls on him. A woman chloroforms a man without his consent. An angry man kills people who have disappointed him. A jaguar attacks a man in a restaurant. A man’s hands are pressed down on a hot surface. A man kills a small animal to use as bait. A man makes a makeshift blow torch and uses it in self defense. There are frequent jump scares and scenes of fantastical violence. Undead characters spread fear and terrorize people while committing acts of violence. Sexual Content: A man and woman kiss. A couple discuss removing a sword from his chest in a manner that conveys extended sexual innuendo. There is a coded conversation about a main character’s homosexuality. Profanity: There are three terms of deity in the movie. A scatological curse is heard in German. Alcohol / Drug Use: Main characters drink alcohol in a bar. Men frequently drink an unnamed beverage out of flasks: it’s likely alcohol. An animal gets drunk and vomits.

Page last updated October 2, 2021

Jungle Cruise Parents' Guide

If a plant could heal all wounds and cure all diseases, what effect would that have on the world? How would it affect countries’ economies? How would it change human culture? How would it affect the way people perceive their lives? Would there be any downsides to such a discovery? How could such a boon be fairly distributed to people around the world?

Related news about Jungle Cruise

Coming to Disney+: July 2021

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Member 883 days ago

i love adventure movies and this was amazing with such a great story i liked it

kangausarupraise 888 days ago

I love this movie. I don't how many times I repeated it and I will...

Sherene 901 days ago

Story line was a bit meah with knowing the MAIN characters were not going to die. The most irritating of this movie was Emily Blunt having fresh make up and lipstick all throughout the movie even after being immersed in water, with clean nicely placed hair. They are in a jungle for goodness sakes. And the MUSIC THROUGHOUT the movie really? Not a movie I would recommend to anyone