WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND NO LAUGHS

Dear old Jean-Claude Van Damme. Back in the day he was great, with thoroughly enjoyable tough action movies like Sudden Death and Hard Target, or abject silliness like Tsui Hark's Knock Off. (Every Hollywood action star should make at least one film about exploding trousers.) But that was many years ago, and for quite a while now he’s been stuck in direct to video nonsense, none of which is anywhere near as much fun as his glory years. There is also the matter of age, of course: sure, he's obviously in far better shape than I am, but he was 52 when he made this and is approaching the point where he can't do those flying spinning kicks to miscreants' heads any more without the risk of putting his hip out. Still, Van Damme has always had a strange innocence about him, a peculiar charm which other DTV stars like Steven Seagal and Dolph Lundgren never possessed, and he was always oddly watchable. But in all his career, I can’t think of any Van Damme film as thoroughly tiresome as this one.

Welcome To The Jungle is for the most part a dreary and tasteless piece of knockabout comedy about office politics: the staff of an advertising agency are sent off for a team building weekend run by ex military badass Jean Claude Van Damme. But the pilot dies, JCVD is pushed off a cliff by a tiger, and the stranded office workers have to try to stay alive or risk descending into madness that is less Lord Of The Flies and more Cannibal Holocaust, except with more knob jokes. The group split into two: the handful of sane people who actually want to get off the island (including the drippy romantic leads), and everyone else drugged into submission by the Office Bastard, a lecherous scumbag who sets himself up as a tribal god....

It’s fairly obvious from about 2 minutes in that the much abused nice guy and the pretty girl will get together, because everyone else is either an idiot, an arsehole, or both. The humour is pretty basic, most of it isn’t even faintly amusing, and there is something badly wrong with a comedy when Jean Claude Van Damme is providing the (relatively) funniest moments. It’s only because the title was also used for a monumentally boring found footage cannibal movie that this isn’t the worst film ever made called Welcome To The Jungle. But it’s a close run thing. (Also not to be confused with the stupid Dwayne Johnson film that was also known as The Rundown, which was at least tolerable because it had Christopher Walken in it.)

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