What is it with Greg McLean?! Has he had a bad experience with backpackers and now wants them to suffer vicariously through his cinematic sadism.
What McLean did for Outback psychos in Wolf Creek, he duplicates for troppo tour guides in South American wilderness in JUNGLE.
Starring Daniel Radcliffe as young Israeli Yossi Ghinsberg, author of the international best-selling 1996 memoir Back from Tuichi: The Harrowing Life-And-Death Story of Survival in the Amazon Rainforest, JUNGLE is a jingle jangle adventure into the depths of self preservation.
What begins as the realisation of a young man’s dream soon turns into a harrowing psychological test of instinctive forbearance and intestinal fortitude.
When 22-year-old Ghinsberg leaves behind a safe future and family in order to chase an improbable fantasy, events take a dark turn. He reaches the enigmatic Lake Titicaca in Peru where he and two new fellow adventurers, Kevin Gale and Marcus Stamm, meet the darkly charismatic Karl Ruchprecter , and follow him on an increasingly nightmarish journey with meagre supplies into the jungle.
The first fifty two minutes plots the slow whittling away of civility between the adventurers, as malady threatens harmony, alpha maleness threatens dictatorship over democracy, and the flora and fauna of the forest threaten physical and psychological safety.
Then, from a gang of four, Ghinsberg is separated to a single, seemingly a sole survivor steeped against insurmountable odds.
More Swiss Army Man than Harry Potter, Daniel Radcliffe acquits himself keenly as Ghinsberg, an Israeli who finds the true meaning and ordeal of surviving in the Bolivian jungle.
Thomas Kretsschmann is suitably charismatic and enigmatic as Karl.
JUNGLE has a quite a quotient of local actors, including Alex Russell, Joel Jackson, and Angie Milliken.
Stefan Duscio, no stranger to photographing luxuriant flora after his luscious work on Canopy, tracks and treks his camera through the arboreal splendour and serpentine curves of the river, capturing the jungle’s majestic and menacing magnificence.
JUNGLE is another story of comfortable, urban, Western men going wild for the discomfort of Third World locales and getting into deep doodoo/trouble.
As the big cat king of the jungle, the jaguar, rightly perceives – humans, especially the male of the species, are just big, dumb monkeys.