Welcome to the Jungle

For those of you with blissful enough lives to be unaware of his existence, The Rock (lest we forget, his real name is Dwayne Johnson) is the biggest phenomenon by far in the lunatic world of American professional wrestling – a standing which should ideally equip him for a career in the movies, given that wrestling itself is entirely a (somewhat heightened) form of behaviourist acting.
Welcome To The Jungle is his second cinematic outing after the cranially-challenged but quite successful The Scorpion King, and though it’s probably the dumbest film in recent recall – well, since the very similar George Of The Jungle at any rate – the great man’s mere presence will surely put zillions of teenage bums on seats.
Despite his impressive action-hero credentials, The Rock is a conventionally dreadful actor, bellowing every line without intonation or inflection of any kind, and he’s amply assisted by Sean William Scott’s cheerfully retarded physical-comedy shtick for the nefarious purposes of Welcome To The Jungle, which casts our intrepid heroes into the middle of the Brazilian rainforest. The Rock plays a fearsome debt collector who’s sent to Brazil in order to retrieve Scott, his boss’s son, who in the interim has discovered a priceless treasure which, unfortunately, is also wanted by local despot Christopher Walken, hamming it up with gusto as a threatening maniac who has the entire forest under surveillance.
No jungle movie, of course, would be complete without an avalanche of jungle clichés, and they’re all predictably present here, even including a tribe of bloodthirsty jungle-dwelling savages who don’t speak English, putting our heroes’ lives in mortal danger, until they’re bailed out by a combination of The Rock’s peerless combat-ace skills and SWS’s fortuitous stupidity.
There’s a lame buddy-movie aesthetic there somewhere, but without lead actors charismatic enough to carry the whole thing off, or a laugh worthy of the name, Welcome To The Jungle ends up drowning in its own slime-pit, with not even Walken able to redeem matters. Fairly horrendous.

104mins. Cert 12pg. Opens March 12