Jungle

UK Release Date. 20 October 2017
Certification. 15
Running Time. 1 hours 55 mins
Director. Greg McLean
Cast. Thomas Kretschmann, Joel Jackson, Daniel Radcliffe, Alex Russell.
Rating. 66%

Review.

Director Greg McLean's Jungle is based on Yossi Ghinsberg's international best-seller, Jungle: A harrowing true story of survival. Separated from his travelling companions, without provisions and just days away from the onset of the rainy season, the film recounts the author's efforts to survive in the hostile and unforgiving Bolivian rainforest. 

A film very much in the spirit of The Beach, Touching The Void, 127 Hours and, to some extent, Embrace Of The Serpent.

The introduction to the three main characters, Yossi Ghinsberg (Daniel Radcliffe), Marcus Stamm (Joel Jackson) and Kevin Gale (Alex Russell) is, in truth, fairly perfunctory. I thought the film only really became interesting when Yossi was isolated and we witnessed the harrowing attempt at survival. At this point, both Greg McLean's direction and Daniel Radcliffe's performance exponentially improves. Isolation, starvation, festering wounds and increasing desperation eventually overwhelm Yossi. Unsurprisingly, Yossi experiences hallucinations and personal epiphanies.

It would have been nigh on impossible to condense all of Ghinsberg's trials and tribulations into one film, and Greg McLean and his screenwriters (Yossi Ghinsberg and Justin Monjo) omitted,

• When Yossi woke up covered in leeches [perhaps, somewhat clichéd]
• When Yossi woke up to find termites eating an area of his skin where he'd urinated on himself
• When Yossi slid down a slope and impaled his rectum on a broken stick.

Daniel Radcliffe produces an impressive performance. His understated charisma, ensures the audience roots for Yossi from the outset. But the characterisation of the supporting cast, Marcus Stamm, Kevin Gale and Karl Ruprechter (Thomas Kretschmann) are scandalously underdeveloped. More time developing these characters may have given the audience a chance to care about someone else other than Yossi, for there is a distinct lack of empathy towards these characters, especially when the final revelations are divulged. 

Whilst Jungle certainly isn't a flawless film, there's enough here to make this an engaging story that acutely depicts the savage brutality of the rainforest.