127 min | PG-13 | July 30, 2021 | Walt Disney Pictures
A riverboat captain with a rigged routine and a secret guides a scientist up the Amazon toward a tree that supposedly cures everything. German soldiers and cursed conquistadors chase them the whole way. The ride is smoother than the movie.
Frank Wolff runs scams on tourists from the deck of a busted riverboat. Dr. Lily Houghton arrives with a stolen arrowhead and a theory about a tree whose petals heal any sickness. They strike a deal and head upriver. Jaume Collet-Serra builds the film as a feature-length version of the Disneyland attraction that gives it the name, complete with the bad puns Frank fires at his passengers. The real subject is brand maintenance. Disney takes a theme-park ride and reverse-engineers a franchise out of it.
Dwayne Johnson plays Frank as a stack of one-liners with a heartbeat. He sells the patter and lands the groaners, but the script keeps his secret hidden so long that he plays half the movie at one note. Emily Blunt plays Lily with more spine than the material earns. She makes the pants-wearing-scientist jokes feel like a person rather than a pitch deck. Jesse Plemons plays Prince Joachim as a German aristocrat in a submarine, and his commitment to the cartoon villainy is the most fun in the picture. Jack Whitehall plays Lily’s brother McGregor as comic relief that arrives pre-digested.
Collet-Serra directs from a script credited to Glenn Ficarra, Michael Green, and John Requa. He stages the river chases with clean geography and a steady sense of where everyone is. The problem sits in the digital ecosystem around the actors. Edgar Ramirez plays the cursed conquistador Lope de Aguirre as a man whose body is overrun by snakes and bees rendered in weightless CGI that never convinces the eye. The Amazon itself is a green-screen confection, and the photography lights every set like a soundstage because it is one.
This is a machine built from other machines. It runs Pirates of the Caribbean through The Mummy and bolts on The African Queen for the two-hander at the center. The pieces fit because they were measured against proven parts, and the result moves without ever surprising you. Johnson and Blunt have enough chemistry to keep the boat afloat. Nobody involved is trying to build anything that outlasts the credits.