Welcome to the Jungle
Reviewer Philippa Hawker
January 1, 2004

Welcome to the Jungle (M)
General release
Rating: ***

The Rock doesn’t have a name that suggests restraint, charm, or a light comic touch. But that’s exactly what’s on show in Welcome to the Jungle, a lively and affable movie with deftly handled action sequences and confident comic performances.

There’s a brief cameo, at the beginning of the film, from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who exits a nightclub just as the character played by The Rock arrives, and greets him with a single sepulchral phrase: “Have fun.” American reviewers have taken this to be a kind of action hero baton-pass, a star anointing his successor in the Highly Paid Hulk department. The Rock looks more comfortable in a suit, however, than the Governor of California ever has and he has a more wryly self-deprecating way with a line. On the evidence of this film, he doesn’t need permission from Arnold for anything.

The Rock – born Dwayne Johnson -is a World Wrestling Federation headliner who made his feature debut in The Mummy Returns, and starred in The Scorpion King. Here, he plays Beck, a high-powered debt collector-cum-bounty hunter, a polite but insistent muscle man who listens to radio cooking shows and, for reasons that are never explained, doesn’t care to use guns. He likes to give his targets the opportunity to co-operate with him, always offering them “Option A” (do as he says) or “Option B” (face the consequences).

After collecting a debt from an NFL star – a tough assignment, given that the man is hanging out in a nightclub with his entire offensive line – Beck is given what he hopes will be his last job: retrieving his mob boss’s son from the Amazon and bringing him back to face the music for some unspecified transgression. After this mission, he plans to retire from the muscle business, and open his own restaurant.

But once he arrives in a remote Brazilian outpost, he realises this assignment is a little trickier than he thought. El Dorado is a mining town presided over by the self-appointed despot Hatcher (Christopher Walken, in a performance that is as light, offbeat and calculatedly eccentric as you could hope for, yet ever-so-slightly on auto-pilot: he can do deliciously unpredictable, scene-stealing riffs in his sleep. It’s a deftly executed crowd-pleaser, but he’s not stretched.)

Hatcher has no interest in letting Beck leave with his target, young Travis Walker (Seann William Scott, all annoying cocksure bravado and comic assurance), because he knows that the kid is on the trail of a priceless ancient artefact. The local bartender Mariana (an under-used Rosario Dawson) is prepared to help Travis but has an agenda of her own.

With a flurry of fist fights, car crashes, kickboxing smackdowns, bullwhip displays and uncomfortable confrontations with baboons, as well as a regular injection of one-liners and gags, Welcome to the Jungle takes off. Writers R.J. Stewart and James Vanderbilt and director Peter Berg haven’t made a film in the same league as Romancing the Stone or The In-Laws (the 1979 original), but Welcome to the Jungle is doing its best to work the same adventure-comedy territory – and enjoying the ride.

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/12/31/1072546578464.html