George of the Jungle (1997)

George of the Jungle arrives from 1997, a Disney comedy assembled from a spec script about a wealthy American woman's jungle romance, then retrofitted to the 1967 cartoon that already parodied Tarzan. Brendan Fraser swings, crashes into trees, and grins through the foliage. Leslie Mann is the heiress who flees a wedding and a domineering mother. A talking gorilla voiced by John Cleese presides over the whole affair with the weary dignity of a man reading a phone book. The film is amiable, weightless, and entirely content to be a lark.

Its cultural temperature is lukewarm at best. The African setting supplies Black performers, including Richard Roundtree as a tour guide and real mayor Willie Brown as himself, and the screenplay treats them as ordinary inhabitants of the story. No commentary is attached, no identity is interrogated. Ursula rejects a socially advantageous marriage and defies her mother, which reads as standard fairy-tale plotting, not a manifesto. The villains want to sell a captured gorilla and shoot an elephant for ivory, offering a faint conservation beat and a fainter jab at greed. Neither amounts to a thesis.

There is nothing here to lecture anyone. The narrator breaks the fourth wall to deliver gags, and the film delivers jokes instead of lessons. George's klutziness is slapstick, not a statement about bodies or brains. Nobody wrestles with history, capitalism, or the climate in any sustained way. It is a product of its era, pleasant and unbothered, waving at a few mild virtues on its way to the treehouse. We score it accordingly, without malice. It simply never set out to save the world, and it never pretends otherwise.