A survival expert gives a perfect score to an overlooked 2017 Daniel Radcliffe movie. He may be best-known for bringing to life on-screen the literary boy-wizard Harry Potter, but Radcliffe’s career has indeed ranged far beyond that one massive cinematic world. Radcliffe has notably challenged himself as an actor in the wake of his Potter success, starring in everything from the offbeat indie film Swiss Army Man to the crazed action-comedy Guns Akimbo to the parody musical biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, just to name a few.
In addition to that eclectic rundown of films, Radcliffe in 2017 starred in a true-life survival movie called Jungle, which went largely overlooked by audiences at the time, but which contains some truly realistic depictions of survival scenarios according to one expert. In a video piece for Insider, jungle survivalist Hazen Audel trains his eye on the Radcliffe-starring movie, praising it for its credible depiction of the dangers of whitewater rapids, and for its attention to detail regarding Amazon survival challenges like food-gathering and dealing with dangerous animals, giving the movie a perfect ten-out-of-ten score. Check out what Audel said below (around 2:50 of the clip):
When you talk about the Amazon, it’s such a vast area. There’s a lot of scenarios, a lot of different kinds of rivers, but there are certainly rivers that are like that, and really muddy like that too and rocky that would be really difficult to navigate. I could see that the watercraft that they had built was out of necessity. The thing to keep in mind is when you build a watercraft like that, they do float but they can still weigh hundreds if not thousands of pounds, so they’re by no means agile.
How that raft hit the rock was very realistic. Wrapping around the rock. That’s a really dangerous scenario. If that was your last ditch effort to avoid going off a big waterfall or going through some rapids that you knew you wouldn’t be able to survive, that’s what you would have to do. They were lucky in that, when that raft hit, they were on the back side of the raft. Usually the raft will go like this and then the water will push it this way, you’re on this way, so you’re between the rock and the raft with all that raging water pressing against and then you drown or you get crushed to death. It helps out if you were experienced and you knew what you were doing doing and if you were purposeful about it. They probably did the right thing. You’re not ever going to be able to swim against the current. You just have to understand the rapids, understand the eddy lines and try to get to shore the best you can, understanding that you’re still going to get swept down the current. I was a professional whitewater guide for many years so that was all par for the course.
Well the biggest killer out there when you’re out in a survival situation, number one killer is exposure, but another big killer is just by getting yourself in trouble and injuring yourself and dying of trauma. So when you do things like, for example, climb a big tree, you fall out of the, tree you’re going to get damaged and hurt, so if you can shake the fruit off of a tree, if you can get a big branch or a rock and try to hit the fruit out of the tree and have it go safely to the ground, that’s your best bet. Sometimes that’s not always the scenario and if you’re desperate for food you take desperate measures. The reason why I love the Amazon is, every single nook and cranny has something living in it. I’m a guy that loves snakes. I’m a little bit of a sicko I can usually tell right away what kind of snake it is and if it poses a danger. They were showing it as aggressive. It was striking but it was a python so it wasn’t going to pose any danger. If it was a poisonous snake like maybe a fer-de-lance or something, you just want to stay out of its striking range for sure. Everything I saw was very plausible I could understand why they were doing what they were doing. I would rate this clip as a 10.
Radcliffe’s Jungle May Be Ripe For Rediscovery
With an overall score of 61% on Rotten Tomatoes, Jungle was only a lukewarm success with critics, but Radcliffe himself was singled out for praise in many reviews. Reel Film Reviews called the actor’s performance “eye-opening” and “completely convincing,” while Substream Magazine effused, “Daniel Radcliffe is precisely the presence who can make a film like Jungle work, and the film largely succeeds by being carried on his shoulders.” Time Out Sydney meanwhile praised the actor for his commitment to the work, saying “Radcliffe throws himself wholeheartedly into the physical demands of this role.”
Given a solid lead performance from the always-compelling Radcliffe, a based-on-fact story and survival situations depicted realistically enough to impress an actual survival expert, Jungle is one overlooked film that is perhaps ripe for rediscovery some six years after it vanished upon initial release. If nothing else, the movie serves as one more reminder that the star of the Harry Potter movies is much more than just an adorable young wizard.
