JUNGLE

McLean, known primarily for more straightforward genre fare in the form of the ‘Wolf Creek’ films, gets things off to a rocky start. Early stretches detail the formation of this group of young men – filled out by American photographer Kevin Gale (Alex Russell) and Swiss teacher Marcus Stamm (Joel Jackson) – and how they came to be duped by would-be guide Karl Ruprechter (Thomas Kretschmann), who led them on a doomed journey to a non-existent tribe of natives. Here, only the barest attempts at characterisation are made, and are only made somewhat passable by the amiable chemistry shared between the three leads. But as the characters are conned by Ruprechter and follow him into the jungle, every decision and action they make feels preordained – and not from the truth of How Things Actually Happened, but by the laziness and impatience of the script. Entire scenes play out in the most clichéd way imaginable, as if whole conversations had been created from an amalgamation of lines from other, better screenplays – there’s no specificity, no sense of how people actually interact.

Every scene feels like the result of a checked box on a list of required moments. Here’s the part where they meet, they argue, they distrust each other, they walk, they fight – until the film finally gets to the point it’s actually interested in, which is Ghinsberg’s time alone in the jungle. And while there are some impressive set pieces, the problem is that by then the story has lost all weight. We don’t care about these people, because the work hasn’t been put in to make them fully fleshed out human beings – which is ironic, because they literally are. Worse still, this feeling of breezing over the greatest hits of this story doesn’t disappear. Each set piece of body horror or natural calamity comes at regular intervals and without any sense of accumulated impact. Which means that at no point do we forget that this is a tale of survival and feel any sort of legitimate fear for Yossi. The stakes simply aren’t there.

Even with this in mind, if the film were a technical achievement, this rather glaring flaw would at least be somewhat forgivable – heck, ‘The Revenant’ fooled people into thinking it was a good film based almost entirely on its cinematography – but alas, that is not the case here. Everything has an odd sheen to it, an overly-lit quality that removes any sense of verisimilitude from proceedings, leaving everything feeling strangely safe for a film about a man who came incredibly close to death in such a dangerous place. And where other similar, better films find a way to tie their stories of survival into grander themes – for instance, man’s relationship with nature, or the spiritual toll of such suffering, or how much Leonardo DiCaprio is willing to do to win an Oscar – only frustratingly brief attempts at developing actual thematic impact appear very late in the game. At which point they are immediately overshadowed by some of the worst dialogue this side of a Michael Bay movie, with one line in particular that I honestly could not believe someone would still think was a good idea in 2017. Seriously. How?

Though the cast is charismatic and eager, and the story it’s based on is indeed astonishing, the film is a disappointingly limp affair. While it tells Yossi Ghinsberg’s story with a clear reverence for the man himself, it forgets to actually be a film in the process.