**I saw this movie a week ago but have been really busy and haven’t gotten a chance to write about it until now.
Jungle Cruise
I was NOT excited to see this movie. For one, I do not love the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland. I never have. To me, it is the ride you go on when the park is really crowded and you don’t want to wait in line for a long time. But I love Emily Blunt and will see just about anything she is in so I went and saw this. And I am glad I did!
I mainly want to talk about the characters and actors involved but first, I want to mention the homage the movie pays to the ride and the Disney experience. There are few Disney movie experiences where the movie makes me want to go to the park, the first half of this one did though. There was a nostalgic, “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” quality to the movie that lends itself perfectly to the Disney spirit which made my experience watching the movie all the better. Once the movie got less joyful and more dark and story-driven, that “Disney” feeling kind of left me but that is to be expected in a movie such as this.
Okay, let’s get to the characters. Emily Blunt is great! As you or I would expect, she is able to take the role of a snotty, know-it-all brit and make it likeable and relatable. Not only is she funny in the role, but there were many moments during the movie where I thought, “That's what I would do!” I also loved how she was a sympathetic character, but I liked how that fact wasn’t shoved in our faces. In order to not jump on the bandwagon and not accept your brother when all your family and friends are not accepting him but rather go against everyone you know, and probably go outside of your comfort zone, to be with your brother is what I’m talking about. Something like that would take a lot of guts and adds a lot of sympathy to her character. It’s something I didn’t fully think through until after seeing the movie, but once I thought it through, I was glad I did.
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was actually great! His movies, for me, are hit or miss. Like you’ll have a movie like “Jumanji” which was great but then you’ll have a movie like “Skyscraper” which is good but not nearly at the caliber of “Jumanji.” I thought he was excellent in this movie! There is a good section of the movie that is dedicated to him making pun jokes. He seems like the type of person who would make pun jokes in real life which made his character completely believable. The fact that he is able to star alongside Emily Blunt and not overpower her performance but also not shrink his role back too far is a sign, to me, of good acting. The chemistry between the two leads was great! It’s hard to convince the audience that the leads don’t like eachother but make us root for them anyway. I think audiences are smart when it comes to human relations, but they were able to do it! And Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson were able to sell it which is another sign of good acting.
I liked Jack Whitehall in this role! I appreciate everything Disney is doing for representation and I appreciate that his character is gay but where I had a problem was the fact that the movie drug it out and emphasized it. His whole part of being like, they didn’t accept me because of who I loved, just seemed a little contrived to me and made the movie more political than I thought it ought to have been. Otherwise, I liked him and his character. Also, did anyone else know that Paul Giamatti was going to be in this?! I didn’t and I loved it! All in all, I really liked this movie! If you haven’t seen it, go see it. You can see it in theaters or on Disney+.
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