★★☆☆☆
What is it that Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson has mistaken for acting, exactly? He is certainly doing something up there on the screen. He’s courteous and polite with everyone he meets, cracking that full-beam smile at every opportunity, like someone staying with his in-laws or a parent attending a school’s open day. He has obviously observed Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career and wants to fast-forward to the part where he reassures us that, despite the tank-like physique, he’s not a threat. Yet he’s not much of anything else either, except blandly reassuring. He is the one thing a film star cannot afford to be: he’s boring.
In Jungle Cruise he plays Frank Wolff, a skipper paid by adventurous scientist Lily Houghton (Emily Blunt) to sail her down the Amazon to find a tree that will heal the world. Wolff, on the other hand, is supposed to be all selfishness and cynicism — like Bogart in The African Queen — and nobility underneath, except he’s not. He’s twinkly nobility all the way through. He strums his guitar and cracks bad jokes and bickers endlessly with Blunt, but they haven’t been allowed a whit of sexual tension so there’s nothing to their back and forths except the gameness of two film stars plucked from the powerball and told to jolly things along. When she hugs him, she gives his biceps those little pats that say: “O-kay, that’s enough now, big fella.”
The rest of the film is busy to the point of tedium. It’s a theme-park ride that has been gussied up into a movie by the powers that be at Disney, but they chose as a director Jaume Collet-Serra, who made the Liam Neeson action flicks Unknown, Non-Stop and The Commuter — a curious choice to direct a kids’ film — and the result is that ten minutes are not allowed to go by without a U-boat attack or someone revealing an ancient Incan curse. It’s Pirates of the Caribbean minus Johnny Depp. Blunt is her usual brisk, honeyed self, but Johnson plays comedy like he’s doing power lifts. My seven-year-old wouldn’t go near it, but then she doesn’t like Disney’s live-action stuff. We got her into Mary Poppins but only on the strict promise that half of it was a cartoon: the platonic ideal to which all entertainment tends, as every child knows. This merely pretends to be one.
“You won’t believe what’s on the television,” John Lennon is reported to have said to Ringo in a phone call after he first saw the band Sparks on TV. “Marc Bolan is playing a song with Adolf Hitler.” If any of their 25 studio albums momentarily escapes you, Sparks are two Californian brothers, Russ and Ron Mael. Russ is the glam-rock pretty boy who sings in a teetering falsetto about Albert Einstein, girls and breastfeeding, while Ron sits hunched over a keyboard in a shirt and tie and a Hitler moustache like a tightly wound lunatic, giving gloriously shifty, sometimes pervy-looking side-eye to the camera.
In cinemas, Jaume Collet-Serra, 12A, 127min
Spirit Untamed
In cinemas
U, 88min
★★★
For children who like horses, this DreamWorks animation is a welcoming home on the range. Set in a mild version of the Old West, it’s the story of a girl who gently subdues a mustang and rides him into an adventure with two friends of hers. There are lots of snazzier animated movies around, but this old-fashioned tale (from the same stable as the Netflix series Spirit Riding Free) has its own appeal. The villain is a proper dastardly fiend, and my heart was in my mouth when the three girls took their horses along the precipitous Ridge of Regret. Edward Porter
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In cinemas; on Netflix from Aug 6
U, 95min
★★★
Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote a few songs for Disney’s Moana, but this Sony production is the first animated movie to give us a full Miranda show. He provided all the songs and voiced the central character: a kinkajou (a cute rainforest-dwelling mammal) who travels to Miami on a musical quest. It’s all conventional stuff, but its musical numbers — full of Miranda’s usual bouncy rhymes — put a spring in its step. EP