Van Damme's character, who's marked as something of a fraud from the get-go, flies the motley yuppies to a tropical island, where things go highly awry pretty quickly. Internecine squabbles, with Brody's capable but still not-assertive-enough Eagle-Scout skills on one side, and Huebel's crazed quasi-anarchic "Lord of the Flies" vibing on another (aided in the latter's case by hallucinogens in a thermos of ersatz coffee that compel a lot of the clerical pool to "go native," inasmuch as that idea might apply), ensue. Soon enough "Welcome to the Jungle" morphs into something like an "Apocalypse Now" parody. Which, to give writer Jeff Kaufman and director Rob Meltzer some credit, is a least a timely joke. Oh wait.
The presence of Huebel and misfit-schtick-mistress Kristen Schaal contribute to a "Best Week Ever" snark-absurdism aspiration, and it's hard to tell whether the failure of this movie is attributable to the fact that stretching that kind of humor into a feature-length film just inherently doesn't work, or if it's just that the jokes themselves aren't that funny. I believe, personally, that it's the latter, but I can't be entirely sure. On the other hand, don't want you to have to spend seven dollars to make sure, so maybe you should take my word for it. Commendably keeping her cool throughout is Megan Boone, pre-"The Blacklist" and hence pre- that awful wig they make her wear on the show; future accounts of the actress, who bids fair to becoming the almost-thinking-man's Cobie Smulders, will note well her professional sangfroid here. As for poor Brody, the comic skills he once summoned up here seem subsumed by a befuddled indifference; he spends most of the movie doing not much else than looking miserable. I cannot say that I blame him.
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