Jungle Cruise

 

Not until we were back out in the sunlight, safely returned from a rollicking trip up the Amazon in “Jungle Cruise,”did I realize it had been almost two years since I had been in an actual movie theater. Chalk up another deep but invisible pandemic-inspired change to life as we used to know it.

Considering what a key role movies – watched on big screens with crowds of strangers in hundreds of theaters across the U.S. mainland and Hawaii – played in that previous life, I didn't know where to start listing all the changes. For openers, going to the movies no longer requires going to a movie theater. The theater is optional. Going to the couch is all that's required. Or, for that matter, going to the palm of your hand. 

And it wasn't just any theater where we went on our “Jungle Cruise.” We – a multigenerational party of seven, stretching in age from seven to 75 – saw it at a uniquely Tucson establishment called the RoadHouse Cinemas. Being the 10:45 a.m. show, it came with lunch. Not only does the RoadHouse Cinema have a big restaurant kitchen serving pizza, burritos, burgers and salads, but also a full bar in the lobby where you can add the beer or margarita.

You sit in a full recliner with a swingaway food tray designed to clear even the most mountainous of guts. The sight of film audiences almost flat on their backs, mounds of food a short reach from tray to mouth, looks uncomfortably like the the WALL-E vision of our future selves: fat, decadent, barely mobile cruise ship passengers. It would be more disquieting if the food weren't so yummy.

The movie is pretty yummy, too … once you get past the fact that it follows the Pirates of the Caribbean template, basing its origin story on a Disneyland ride. It's a throwback to the pirate adventures I watched in my youth, with elaborate maps like works of art, pointing the perilous route to the treasure.

It also echoes the unlikely cross-class chemistry of Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in “The African Queen.” That chemistry is “Jungle Cruise's” most indelible quality for viewers of a certain age. Saucy, delectable Emily Blunt as Lily Houghton is the secret ingredient that brings out a new dimension in the world's most popular action figure. Watching her bicker and banter with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's Frank Wolff is the stuff true romance is made of, from Shakespeare to Hollywood's golden age.

Being a Disney production, the movie comes clad in political correctness du jour. It throws in feminist anachronisms, from Emily Blunt's trousers (The Rock nicknames her “Pants”), to noting that London's stodgy royal scientific society was an all-male fraternity. When the third member of their party, Lily's brother MacGregor (Jack Whitehall), reveals that he's gay, it doesn't come as a surprise. It plays for some of the film's best laughs that fly right over the heads of the kids in the audience. Paul Giamatti's on hand, too, to add prestige to the role of resident buffoon.

Disney's gender messaging in recent decades has helped empower generations of little girls, just it convinced their mothers before them that Prince Charming was out there somewhere to make everything perfect. The folks at Disney sold plenty of lunch boxes and logowear either way.

The quest up the river is a search of fabled tree whose blossoms have the power to cure disease, undo ancient curses and, just for good measure, save the world. I have to admit my brain's not the best at connecting the dots or following the action when it shifts into CG green-screen mode. I would have preferred more witty gritching from Lily and Frank.

“Jungle Cruise” animatronically evokes the exotic ecology of its Amazon locale with birds, bugs, critters and snakes showing up whenever the action lags. It illustrates the old Eastern adage that as far as Buddhists are concerned, everyone's a Buddhist … even the bugs. Probably not what the writers had in mind, but a nice touch.

For some reason it also reminded me of Shakespeare's seven ages of man soliloquy, where we all progress from infancy to maturity, then back again. “Jungle Cruise” showed me how far I've come on the bell-shaped curve, and time warped me back to being a kid sitting in a '50s Oklahoma picture show palace, beguiled by a pirate and smart beautiful woman on a silver screen. I'm still ready to embark with them on adventures beyond my dreams.

Nice to know some things never change.