Review of Welcome to the Jungle (2013) by Jason L — 17 Jan 2015

You know how the other day I was talking about Bruce Willis not actually being that great at strictly comedy. He's fine in action/sci-fi/comedy hybrids like the Die Hard series or The Fifth Element, but he's horrible in strictly comedies where the action is more limited.

So color me surprised when Jean Claude Van Damme, inferior as an actor to Bruce Willis in almost every way, is actually better than him at comedy. He found away to adjust his "style" towards something that's a little bit more "outside the box" than the stuff he usually does.

The guy legitimately made me laugh a couple of times. Not hearty laughter or anything, but he got more laughs out of me than Bruce Willis did in The Whole Nine Yards. Don't get me wrong, though, while this film was better than I would've ever anticipated, it's still not something that I would say was even remotely good.

This is taking into consideration how awful everything prior to the actual retreat was. Boy, it was really rough going at the beginning there. It was probably enough for me, on a day where I was in a real shitty mood, to have stopped watching it because it didn't do anything for me.

But there's some legitimately inspired bits. Van Damme and Kristen Schaal easily get the best lines in the movie. And the whole idea of Phil becoming a god with his own cult is ridiculously absurd, but it definitely yields some laughs.

Problem is, while the film definitely has a decent enough cast, it's mostly relying on the raunch and the cursing in order to make you laugh. And it works to an extent, like when Brenda goes on her tirade about the things she's heard on camp, but not actually saying the curse words, just shortening them like Mf'er and stuff like that.

That's probably not that funny of a joke, but Kristen Schaal makes it work. Then, afterwards, when Brenda talks about taking a shit. Again, it probably wouldn't have worked if it was anyone else other than Kristen, but she makes it worth watching and funny.

Other than that, though, the film doesn't really do a good job at being consistently funny. It's a very up and down film unfortunately. Which is kind of a shame, because the film could've been truly great once it got to the island for the retreat.

Like there was some real potential there for a really crazy story. And there's hints of that here, with the whole cult, orgies, and drugs thing, but it simply doesn't get as crazy as it potentially could've.

I wouldn't exactly recommend this movie, but it's definitely gonna "sneak" up on a lot of people. I put that in quotation marks, because it's not like this is a sleeper film. A movie that everyone overlooked but is actually great.

This is not that, clearly. But it's better than it had any right to be. Van Damme does a surprisingly good job here, as well. You could, honestly, find much worse films to watch than this. You could also find BETTER films to watch than this, but this didn't make me pull my hair out, so that's a positive.