The Jungle is set up as a documentary. It starts out by telling you "In 2011 Big Cat expert Larry Black set out to find and film endangered leopards in the remote jungles of Indonesia. This is the footage from that expedition." Essentially, they are looking for breeding pairs and checking the viability of the Javan Leopards. The movie opens with scenes of Larry Black (Rupert Reid) and his brother Ben at home before they leave for the jungle. Larry says goodbye to his wife and dog and the pair set off for adventure. Ben is supposed to be Larry’s tracker, cameraman, and general lackey. When they get to Indonesia, they meet up with Budi (Agoes Widjaya Soedjarwo). He’s their contact over there and he helped set everything up with the government. Budi informs Larry that the government has stated that they must take a local tracker with them. Adi (Igusti Budianthika) is their new tracker and the four set off.
They decide first to go talk to the local residents. Apparently something has been eating local cattle and livestock, but they haven’t really seen many leopard tracks or anything like that. The rumors are that there is a forest demon that they should be careful of and Adi confesses that he believes in the forest demons. When they find the first dead leopard in the jungle, Budi and Adi want to leave. The only two things in the jungle there that kill leopards are poachers and other leopards and that mangled beast that they find obviously wasn’t killed by a poacher. Budi and Adi say that it is dangerous to stay there because it is not a leopard that killed the dead leopard they found. Larry believes that it is simply a giant leopard and he is determined to tag it. When all they get is giant teeth on the video, I think I would hightail it out of there, but of course they’re still looking to tag the leopards. Things start going downhill quickly and they are going to have to work hard and be smart to make it out alive.
While this might sound like an ok, if a bit cliché plot, I’m going to rename this one "The Blair Witch Project with Leopards." A huge portion of the movie is simply these four men running through the woods. At least half of the movie (or at a minimum it feels like more than half) was filmed using night vision goggles, so it’s simply all green. It was quite monotonous and difficult to discern what was going on a lot of the time. There’s nothing really likable about any of the characters, so you find you don’t really care if they survive or not. Obviously, the person that designed the back cover of the DVD had never seen the movie because there are no soldier-looking guys with big guns, nor is there a 30-foot giant monster ripping through the trees. I might have been more interested if there had been. The only thing that was nice to watch were the leopards. They are beautiful creatures. Otherwise, I can’t find any reason to suggest that you sit through The Jungle.
