Frank Wolff runs cheap cruises on the Amazon river. The peace of his existence is shattered when emancipated Lily Houghton and her louche brother MacGregor, show up with an ancient arrowhead reputed to show the way the mythical tree of life, which cures all illness. Pursued by a German prince and his u-boat, they must find the tree in order to prevent Germany from winning the Great War. Undead conquistadors complicate matters further.

JUNGLE CRUISE wants to be PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN. Disney clearly wants JUNGLE CRUISE to be PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN. They want it so much, they have taken the template set by PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN and tried to copy it wholesale. Basing a big budget film on a ride featuring animatronic pirates was a huge risk, so basing one on a ride with nothing more exciting than an animatronic hippo was always going to be even more so. Since the ride has no plot, several have been borrowed and sewn together into this lumpy narrative. The supernatural conquistadors are clearly the undead pirates from PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN. The opening and closing London sequences are taken from any version of THE LOST WORLD you care to mention (except the JURASSIC PARK one, of course). The adventures of Lara Croft provide the inspiration for the puzzle-solving and underwater trap sequences. Throwing in the U-boat screams of Indiana Jones. The relationship between emancipated woman and delinquent brother is straight out of 1999's THE MUMMY reboot. If you're going to steal, steal from the best.

Sadly, you can mix the most delightful ingredients together and end up with a stodgy mess. The plot of JUNGLE CRUISE is just such a stodgy mess.

The film, however, plays its master card in its casting. Emily Blunt can do strong woman in a man's world all day long and handles the comedy, more physical and less wordplay, with aplomb. Jack Whitehall is perfectly fine, but never more than that, as her pampered brother and the film can afford to completely waste Paul Giamatti in what amounts to little more than a cameo. The big gun, though, is Dwayne Johnson. He is the biggest movie star in the world for good reason and his hugely affable persona papers over a lot of cracks. Though he's not quite convincing as the romantic lead, and looks uncomfortable when trying, he appears to be having the time of his life with everything else. Giving him an endless supply of 'dad' jokes doesn't hurt with the younger audience either.

The villains of the piece fare rather more badly. Jesse Plemons plays Prince Joachim as a cartoon character of a man who never manages to exude any sort of danger at all. That threat is left to the undead conquistadors, each made up of something nasty. If you dont like snakes or bugs, you might want to sit this one out. Those characters, though, are not given any development. Flashbacks show the people they were and how they came to be what they are, but there is no sense of those people in the monsters they are now.

The action is fast and frenetic and slick, but also very familiar. Dwayne Johnson was doing all these very recently in the JUMANJI reboots and both Lara Croft and Indiana Jones have covered this ground before quite comprehensively. AS a result, there is a sense of having been there and done that.

The photography and set design are flawless, though the effort appears to have gone into the jungle settings because the London bookends have a very poorly-CGI'd feel to them.

JUNGLE CRUISE is a corporately manufactured film created from several others stitched together and you can see the joins. The pleasures, and there are pleasures to be had, mainly from the two leads, are more likely to appeal to the less discerning or younger audiences.

There's only so far Dwayne Johnson's innate likeability can take any film.