Jungle Cruise

Jaume Collet-Serra’s 127 minute film follows Lily, hunting a healing tree in the Amazon, and Frank, the skipper who takes her upriver. Frank’s puns are lifted straight from the skipper spiel on the Disneyland ride, so the deliberately bad, repetitive humour is a quotation rather than weak writing. Photography ran from 16 May to 14 September 2018. Most of the Amazon was built in Hawaii, across seven weeks around the Kapaia Reservoir on Kauai, then at Blackhall Studios in Atlanta. The release moved from October 2019 to July 2020 and then, because of the pandemic, to 30 July 2021, leaving about three years between wrap and release. Disney opened it in cinemas and on Disney+ the same day, charging subscribers a one time fee of $29.99 for Premier Access. Halfway through, the genre changes: the joking skipper turns out to be a conquistador under a centuries old curse. Lily’s brother MacGregor also comes out to Frank over a drink, in a scene that never uses the word and is not staged as a turning point. A good fit if you can take the skipper’s bad wordplay knowing it was copied from the ride. Not for you if you expect the light first half to hold: the film drops that tone once Frank becomes a cursed conquistador.