How Brendan Fraser’s Himbo Makes Dumb Fun Work

When I look for a new film, what I want more than anything is an interesting story with well-developed themes… except for when I just want some good old-fashioned fun, that is, which is where movies like George of the Jungle come in. Watching this film from the perspective of a writer, you quickly come to realise just how hard it is to make a guilty pleasure movie that's actually watchable. It‘s not because of the hilariously bad CGI, or even Brendan Fraser’s admittedly appealing physique - instead, the true key to making a good bad movie comes from the difference between a film taking itself seriously and making itself serious.

Taking Yourself Seriously

George of the Jungle isn’t a perfect film - if it were it wouldn’t be worth analysing - but it does far more right than it does wrong. The key is that the film is ridiculous, and it's committed to being ridiculous. The writers had no fear as they added in an elephant-dog or had George lick a sleeping Ursula for absolutely no apparent reason, willing to get as weird as the movie needed. The script can’t stand alone, of course, as the rest of the crew also had to both understand and completely accept and give into the hilarity of it all to make it work, but it all started with the script - without that baseline, even the hammiest of performances wouldn’t land.

Arguably more important than the commitment to fun, though, is how welcoming and empathetic the script is to the audience. Of course, every film needs to understand its viewers, but this particularly shines given George of the Jungle’s ridiculous premise. Nonetheless, the film manages to win over the audience by both breaking the fourth wall and having a character who the audience can empathise with. The film has two kinds of fourth-wall breaks: characters speaking directly to the camera, which is daily standard, and characters providing meta-commentary on the film itself. An example of both can be seen in the clip above where a guide turns to the camera and highlights the tropes they're playing into. With this line, the film recognises its overwrought campiness and reassures the audience that they’re in on the joke together. Ursula’s character, as well, helps the film by expressing the same incredulity and shock as the audience feels before slowly losing herself to the madness of it all, inviting the audience to follow her example and just let things happen. Combining both techniques, then, the audience is convinced to surrender themselves and take the movie seriously in its lack of seriousness.

Making Yourself Serious

As I mentioned, though, George of the Jungle isn’t a perfect dumb fun film, simply because as much as it succeeded to take itself seriously, there were a few moments when it shied away from its identity. To be truly successful as a good-bad movie, the film would have needed to stick to its tone of ridiculous wild fun - instead, though, it started to develop a little too much plot. The film loses itself when it leaves the jungle, getting bogged down by Ursula’s family drama about her marriage. There are still jokes, and the performances are as silly as ever, but it nonetheless ends up feeling like a low point in the film. My theory is that the producers were afraid to have a film with so little substance and so they tried to put some in, but it ends up flattening the cotton-candy fluffiness that the movie could have otherwise had and feels oddly out of place with the rest of the movie.

I want to be clear, though, that making good dumb fun isn’t about avoiding serious topics overall - it’s about being tonally consistent when you do. Nowadays, many comics claim to live in fear of making political jokes and getting “cancelled”, but George of the Jungle, despite all its craziness, proves that comedy and politics can be combined without being a drag or offending people. Most of the interactions between Lyle and the jungle guides are a direct mockery of Western attitudes towards “undeveloped” nations, and the narrator also chimes in with the occasional political jab too, such as when he says that Ursula takes George shopping for men’s clothes because she is “of conservative mind regarding gender roles”. Serious topics are okay, as long as they are treated with the same irreverence as everything else.

So What Makes a Pleasure?

And why is it guilty? Well, the pleasure lies in the pure passion everyone involved has for the project. While George of the Jungle succeeds because of its commitment to the comedy of its premise, other films, like Con Air or Mamma Mia 2 aren’t comedies but are still enjoyable to watch because of the sheer dedication of the people who made it. As soon as the movie starts to stray away from the central passion or tries to be something other than what it is, it loses itself. As for the guilt, that just comes from the idea that a film should be artistic to be valuable, an idea that quite simply needs to change. As long as we cling to the idea that all good movies must be works of art, we’ll be stuck with the same old bland films and deny ourselves the joy of watching movies that are just dumb fun.