Based on Disneyland’s theme park ride where a small riverboat takes a group of travelers through a jungle filled with dangerous animals and reptiles but with a supernatural element. There’s no tagline?

Jungle Cruise PosterJungle Cruise seems to be the love child of writers that wanted to combine The Mummy and Pirates of the Caribbean, and it almost worked.

Almost.

Unfortunately, nothing about this movie sticks out. The Mummy has more adventure and didn’t slog along, and Pirates had a romping score to go along with the swashbuckling and crazy Johnny Depp we all love. But Jungle Cruise doesn’t quite pull it off: the story takes too long to get going, the effects are all CGI, and while they don’t look too bad, it’s still noticeable, and some of stunts are a little too implausible. (Jumping a boat over a dock. Um, no.) The writing just wasn’t tight enough.

The Rock and Emily Blunt do fine jobs. They have good chemistry together. And you’re watching a movie with The Rock, he’s going to play “The Rock”, and you’ll enjoy it like every other movie you’ve seen with “The Rock”.

But for all the good points, it just adds up to mediocre.

And then there is the usual woke BS. The comedy relief character is a stereotypical effeminate, gay man, playing the coward. The character could have been a wimp that learns to stick up for himself without the sexual angle. The audience didn’t need to know that his “interests” lied elsewhere because it’s not relevant to the story. The only romance in the story is between the characters of The Rock and Emily Blunt.

And then there was the dig at the patriarchy: The cannibal tribe in the Amazon has a woman for a chief. After jumping a riverboat over a dock Fast and the Furious style, I didn’t even blink at the cannibal tribe chief being a woman. Her English accent was more jarring than her gender, but since a modern audience doesn’t bat an eye about this anymore, the writers made it a big deal and portrayed the male only “scientific community” as outraged. Oy vey.

Honestly, those were small moments in the movie and they didn’t detract too much except to pull the audience out of their suspension of disbelief; however, with Jungle Cruise, that disbelief is the thing that makes it work.

IMDB gives it 6.6. That’s a point too high.

Watch: Sure, it has it’s moments, just not many.

Re-watch: No. Re-watching Mummy or Pirates will be more satisfying.