Movie reviews: 'Jungle Cruise' a family friendly film that actually feels like the theme park ride

Reviews: 'The French Dispatch' and 'Snakehead' Film critic Richard Crouse shares his reviews for 'Last Night in Soho', 'The French Dispatch' and 'Snakehead'.

JUNGLE CRUISE: 4 STARS

“Jungle Cruise,” now playing in theatres and on Disney+ with premium access, is a new adventure story that reaches back into Hollywood history for inspiration.

The Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson movie is based on the 65-year-old Disneyland riverboat cruise theme park ride, which, in turn, was inspired by the Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn’s antics in the 1951 film “The African Queen.” Add to that a hint of “Indiana Jones” and “Romancing the Stone,” and you have a family friendly film that simultaneously feels brand spankin’ new and old fashioned.

Blunt is the eccentric botanist Dr. Lily Houghton, an English adventurer in search of the Tree of Life, a mythical Amazonian tree whose “Tears of the Moon” blossoms are said to have healing properties. If she can find it and harness its powers, she believes it will be the beginning of a scientific revolution.

Travelling from London to the Amazon, she meets steamboat captain "Skipper" Frank Wolff (Johnson), a fast-talking cynic who reluctantly agrees to take her and her assistant, brother MacGregor (Jack Whitehall), on his ramshackle boat into the heart of darkness.

“If you believe in legends,” Frank says, “you should believe in curses too. It’s not a fun vacation.”

On the voyage up river they contend with slithery supernatural beings and the rival Prince Joachim (Jesse Plemons), a Hapsburg aristocrat determined to use brute force to reach the Tree of Life before Houghton, on a dangerous race against time.

Movies based on theme park rides have a checkered history. For every “Pirate of the Caribbean” that becomes a hit and spawns sequels, there is a “The Haunted Mansion” or “Tomorrowland” gathering dust in a delete bin somewhere.

“Jungle Cruise” seems likely to avoid that fate. A classic adventure, it is an action-packed journey fuelled by the chemistry between the leads, Blunt and Johnson.

The opening half-hour actually feels like the theme park ride. It takes off like a rocket with one elaborately staged action scene after another. That sets the frenetic pace the movie keeps up for most of the running time, right up to a drawn-out ending that threatens to overstay its welcome, but doesn’t, courtesy of the actors.

Blunt and Johnson have great chemistry, verbally jousting throughout. It’s the “Romancing the Stone” template; they’re an odd couple who roast one another while dodging life-threatening situations and ultimately reveal their true feelings. The comic timing works and adds much charm to the action sequences.

Threatening to steal the show is Plemons, who reveals his rarely used comedic side. As the power-mad Prince Joachim, the actor embraces the cartoon aspects of the character, creating one of the best family-friendly villains in recent memory.

“Jungle Cruise” is much more fun than you might imagine a movie based on a theme park ride will be. There’s some dodgy CGI and a slightly over-inflated running time, but it’s an old-fashioned adventure, updated with one character’s coming-out scene (no spoilers here) and a reversal of the theme park’s treatment of its Indigenous characters, that delivers action, humour and chemistry.

THE GREEN KNIGHT: 2 ½ STARS

“The Green Knight,” a new medieval fantasy film now playing in theatres, reaches back to Arthurian legend and a fourteenth-century poem for its hero’s journey.

Based on the poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” the movie stars Dev Patel as King Arthur's nephew and Knight of the Round Table, Sir Gawain. The young man is headstrong and rash but, despite his bravado, he says, “I fear I am not meant for greatness.”

The young knight sees a chance to prove his mettle when the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), a larger-than-life, green skinned “tester of men,” throws down a challenge to King Arthur.

“O greatest of kings, let one of your knights try and land a blow against me,” he says. “Indulge me in this game.”

Gawain impulsively accepts, charging at the stranger, removing his head with one blow.

But the challenge isn’t over.

Picking his own head up off the floor, the Green Knight mocks Gawain, commanding him to meet again in one year’s time at a cursed place, the Green Chapel, to finish their duel. As the headless adversary gallops off, Gawain’s quest to test his prowess begins. The journey to the Green Chapel is a dangerous adventure, fraught with supernatural forces, betrayal and challengers who will test the strength of his character.

“What do you hope to gain from all of this?” he is asked. “Honour,” Gawain replies. “That is why a knight does what he does.”

Calling “The Green Knight” an adventure implies that it is also exciting. It has all the earmarks of an old school “Lord of the Rings” style adventure story—there are trippy giants, a talking fox, a headless woman and more—but exciting it is not.

Director David Lowery has made a cerebral movie about finding one’s true path in life through trials and temptations. His retelling of the classic poem is dense, deliberate and often beautiful. But just as often it is willfully obtuse as it gets lost in the surreal deconstruction of Gawain’s journey. As a result, the film is oft times more interesting than actually entertaining.

Near the end of the film Gawain asks, “Is this all there is?” Oddly enough, life imitated art in that moment as I found myself wondering the same thing.

THE EXCHANGE: 3 ½ STARS

Sometimes you don’t get what you want, but you get what you need. Especially in coming-of-age movies.

In “The Exchange,” now on VOD, teenager Tim Long (Ed Oxenbould) was born and has lived his entire life in a small Ontario town, but feels like an outsider. Obsessed with all things French, he’s a student of Camus, worships Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, and looks down on his school mates and even family. The feeling is mutual. “Bookworm” and “loser” are two of the nicer jabs thrown his way.

“Everyone hates you,” says Gary (Justin Hartley) the school’s soccer coach. The only person Tim really likes is Brenda (Jayli Wolf), who is unaware of his crush.

Craving sophisticated company, he signs up for an exchange program to acquire a "mail-order best friend." He’s hoping the exchange student will be a Gallic breath of fresh air in his stale little town. But instead of an erudite tour guide to all thing French he gets Stéphane (Avan Jogia), a teenage chain-smoking horndog more interested in girls than Gruyère Gougères.

After making a splash in town, Stéphane’s behaviour soon starts to raise eyebrows until he finds an unlikely supporter.

“The Exchange” is based on a true story. Screenwriter Tim Long, a Canadian from Manitoba who has been the consulting producer of “The Simpsons” for twenty plus years, adapts his own awkward friendship with an exchange student as the basis for the story.

I’m sure characters are amplified and situations blown out of proportion, but underneath it all “The Exchange” is a feel-good story with laughs and a great deal of heart.

It’s lighthearted, but that doesn’t prevent “The Exchange” from adding denser textures to the story. Near the end Long and director Dan Mazer (longtime writing partner of Sacha Baron Cohen) tackle the xenophobia that informs the latter part of the movie. After a brief moment of celebrity in town, the tide turns against Stéphane due to veiled racism. He is, as the Gallophile Tim might have said, l'étranger, an outsider whose motives are questioned, simply because he wasn’t born in the local hospital.

It gets sorted—“We drew certain conclusions about you being different,” a character says to him—and is handled delicately, but in our divided times it hits the nail on the head.

Ultimately, “The Exchange” works because it is about empathy. It’s funny, with the kind of premise that could have been sitcom fodder, but beyond the laughs is a bigger message of acceptance.

FOR MADMEN ONLY: THE STORIES OF DEL CLOSE: 4 STARS

“For Madmen Only: The Stories of Del Close,” a new documentary now on VOD, is about the best-known funny man you’ve probably never heard of. Tina Fey says he taught her to be bold in life. Mike Myers says he learned the connection between comedy and bigger ideas from him, and Robin Williams campaigns for a Church of Del. Del Close is called a living legend by Amy Poehler and yet, as the movie says, this Zelig of comedy has the same name recognition as a third-tier fast food chain.

As one of the pioneers of a new kind of theatre called improvisational comedy Close, along with a handful of others like Elaine May (who Close calls a supernatural figure) and Mike Nichols, created the form and the rules of performing comedy without a net.

Some were intellectual.

“Always work at the top of your intelligence,” and “Don’t deny, respect the other person’s reality.”

Others practical.

“Remember where the objects are,” and “Don’t do mime.” Most important of all, “You’re not locked into this like an actor with a script.”

Using recorded interviews with Close, who died of emphysema at age 64 in 1999, and newer interviews with many of his friends and students, like the names I listed above and Tim Meadows, George Wendt, Bob Odenkirk among others, plus recreations, (which have a “Closeness” about them because director Heather Ross based on Close the autobiographical comic “Wasteland”), and archival footage and photographs, a story emerges of a self-destructive rebel who put human nature onstage in an attempt to explore why we behave the way we do.

By the end of the film, it’s a portrait of a complicated man whose window into human nature was both a gift and a curse. He was, as Dave Thomas describes him, “a delicate basket of eggs destined to break at any moment.” He was brilliant, but as Adam McKay points out, also a “bit of a baby sometimes.”

What remains is his pioneering work teaching improv (with a big leg up from Charna Halpern). His “Harold” teaching method, the structure used in longform improvisational theatre, is both rigid—there are a set of strict rules—but also freeing in a way that made his students, as Myers says, “get in touch with their higher selves.”

“You have a light within you,” he would tell them. “Burn it out.”

You can draw a straight line from Close to most folks who have made you laugh in the last thirty years. He was a guru, who never reaped the rewards or the recognition many of his students enjoyed, but the film aims to correct the latter.

As often happens in biographies, the legend sometimes looms larger than life. Did he really give L. Ron Hubbard the idea to start a religion to circumvent taxes? Did he really volunteer to have his dreams monitored by the U.S. government while high on LSD, leave the project early and then sent a letter saying he owed the government one more dream?

Who knows? They’re good stories though. Fact and fiction, it seems are the two sides of the coin that inform the legend of Del Close.