In a sentenceDaniel Radcliffe rots convincingly for two hours and the film still cannot make us fear for him
Yossi (Daniel Radcliffe) is a young traveller a long way from home, looking for the kind of adventure his parents would not sign off on. In a town on the edge of the rainforest he falls in with Marcus (Joel Jackson) and Kevin (Alex Russell), two other travellers passing through, and the three are approached by Karl (Thomas Kretschmann), an older man who says he knows a way through the jungle to a village no tourist has seen. They set out on foot with more confidence than kit. Marcus’s feet blister, Kevin loses patience with him, and Karl’s stories stop adding up. Back home, Yossi’s father (Jacek Koman) and mother (Angie Milliken) are the people he keeps thinking of as the walk gets harder and the forest closes in.
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Daniel Radcliffe starves, sinks and rots with total conviction, and Greg McLean’s film never finds a way to make the forest around him frightening. A remarkable story, told in the right order and at the wrong pitch.
Greg McLean takes Daniel Radcliffe into the rainforest and leaves him there for most of two hours. Jungle is a survival story that knows how extraordinary its ordeal is and assumes that telling it in order will do. Too dutiful, in other words. For long stretches the telling does not do, and we spent much of the middle hour respecting Radcliffe’s effort and waiting for the film to frighten us.
The first forty minutes are the most conventional and, oddly, the best. Justin Monjo’s script sets up the party with the efficiency of a war film: the dreamer, the practical one, the soft one, the stranger who knows the way. Thomas Kretschmann plays Karl with a held-back geniality that keeps us guessing whether he is a fraud or just a man who has been out here too long, and Joel Jackson’s Marcus, blistered and increasingly pitiful, gives the walk its one real argument. Alex Russell’s Kevin has less to do than a second lead should. Sean Lahiff cuts this stretch briskly and the film moves.
Then the walk turns into an ordeal, and the film has to become something else, and McLean does not seem sure what. Stefan Duscio shoots the forest green and gold and dripping, and it is handsome, but it is never threatening. The camera looks at trees; it does not make us feel shut in by them. Rain falls, mud rises, a jaguar appears and is dealt with, and the danger arrives in episodes rather than as pressure. Matthew Putland’s production design and Vanessa Loh’s costumes do the honest work of rotting Radcliffe’s clothes off him, but a man in wet rags is not the same as a man we fear for.
We did feel something, and we should say what. There is a stretch in the second half we will not describe, in which the film stops looking at the forest and looks hard at Yossi instead, and we winced, then covered our eyes, then were grateful, because for two minutes the film had our whole body. It is the one sequence where McLean’s background in horror is allowed to help. The hallucinations of home that Monjo writes in, with Jacek Koman and Angie Milliken as Yossi’s parents and John Bluthal as his uncle, tell us that Yossi misses his family and is losing his grip, which we had rather assumed.
Radcliffe is good, and better than the film around him. He plays Yossi as a nice boy who has run out of nice, and by the last half hour the weight loss, the sunburn and the flat, exhausted eyes are doing more storytelling than the script. He does not overplay the madness, which is the trap in this kind of part. When the scenes fail, and several do, it is never because of him.
Johnny Klimek’s score is the film’s most persistent mistake. It swells under every rise and dip in Yossi’s fortunes and tells us what to feel about thirty seconds before the image does, so the image, when it arrives, feels like confirmation. A survival film lives on silence, and McLean has one of the loudest jungles we can remember. Lahiff’s editing, so quick in the first act, settles in the second half into trudge, collapse, vision, trudge, and the 115 minutes begin to feel like a good many more.
Against the standard of the genre this is minor. Touching the Void and 127 Hours both understood that the horror of being stranded somewhere terrible is mostly time, and both made time itself the enemy. Jungle keeps interrupting it. The reviews so far land about where we do, mixed to poor, and we have no quarrel with them except to say that Radcliffe deserves more than the word “committed” usually gives an actor.
Worth an evening if you collect survival stories and can forgive a film for standing in front of a good one. The 15 certificate is earned in the second half. On a small screen the forest shrinks to a pleasant place for a walk, which is roughly what the film makes of it anyway.
The accessible page does not reveal the critic’s verdict. It describes the film as a survivalist drama-turned-thriller but provides no specific praise or complaint.
Read the full review →The article is identified as a review, but its verdict cannot be verified from the inaccessible page. Its specific praise or criticism is likewise unavailable.
Read the full review →Smith gives the film a middling rating, presenting it as a nervy adventure-thriller. The available description singles out its tense Amazon survival premise and notes that it avoids the gruelling horror associations of the director’s earlier work.
Read the full review →Lodge finds the film engagingly taut at first, but increasingly muddled as its protagonist becomes isolated. He praises the polished direction and vivid cinematography, while faulting the script’s thin characterization and unilluminating hallucinations.
Read the full review →Windsor finds the film a middling survival thriller, weakened by rushed scenes and unconvincing embellishments. He praises Daniel Radcliffe’s committed performance and singles out the film’s vivid, gruesome survival imagery.
Read the full review →Abele finds the film an earthbound slog that lacks momentum and psychological depth. He praises its cinematography and Daniel Radcliffe’s convincing physical performance.
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Touching the VoidTwo men, one rope, one mountain; the waiting is the terror and it never lets up.
127 HoursOne man wedged in a canyon, and Boyle makes five days feel like a fever.
Aguirre, the Wrath of GodHerzog’s conquistadors drift down the Amazon into madness; the river does the acting.
WalkaboutTwo children lost in the Australian desert, shot as if the land were dreaming them.
Embrace of the SerpentA Colombian shaman guides two explorers through the rainforest, decades apart, in black and white.
