Rock-ing with guns'n'Rosario

3:34pm Tuesday 23rd March 2004

Welcome to the Jungle (12A)

Popcorn rating: 3 out of 5

You can guess what type of film Welcome to the Jungle will be from its opening minutes. Former wrestler-turned-actor The Rock walks into a club as Arnold Schwarzenegger walks out, and wishes him good luck. Five minutes later, the big boys of an American football team have been mercilessly beaten up as The Rock collects the bounty he has been paid to collect.

The Rock stars as modern-day bounty hunter Beck, who must take on the inevitable 'final job' in order to realise his dream of opening a restaurant.

Travelling into the heart of the Amazon jungle with orders to collect the wise-cracking son of a crime boss (Seann William Scott), Beck instead finds himself searching for lost treasure and having to take on Christopher Walken's unhinged despot and Rosario Dawson's guerilla leader not to mention the perilous terrain, some horny monkeys and the odd slice of hallucinogenic fruit.

The Rock comes across as far more charismatic than most of the Eighties action heroes in this tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top adventure.

While the film does, ultimately, lose its way amid its urgency to reach a Commando-inspired, one-man-against-the-odds style finale, director Peter Berg still manages to find the comic irony of the situation.

This is, plain and simple, a Saturday night, brain-dead popcorn flick, which aspires to be nothing else and which feels all the better for it.

Review by Rob Carnevale