Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2026 May 06 • Wednesday

The movie Jaguar Lives! is based on a book of the same name by Yabo Yablonsky, who also wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation.

It’s not good.

A lot of popular culture, at least Western popular culture but perhaps global popular culture, has been what ended up just calling itself Men’s Adventure fiction. Men of action who can be heroes and villains but are male fantasies of competence, particularly of sex and violence competence.

This is Homer, this is mythology, this is Arthurian knights and the Scarlet Pimpernel and Diabolik and James Bond and Jack Reacher and any number of fictional characters across numerous media and genres.

There are hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, too many, really, for one person to offer a coherent, critical survey of whatever they are: a niche genre, a sub genre, a splinter group, an attitude, a dream or some combination of some of those?

Certainly the best of them make it look easy, just as their heroes’ competence and capability will always be more than equal to the task.

And then there’s a book like Yabo Yablonsky’s Jaguar Lives! that’s enlightening for how it misses all the marks.

Jonathan Cross was Jaguar, a super-duper action hero agent who was a member of an elite group of such agents, code-named the Big Cats. In addition to Jaguar there were the Bengal, the Leopard, the Black Lion and the Panther. Cross has had plastic surgery and has been peacing out in New Mexico with his Apache martial arts mentor, though they have to beat up some racist rednecks in the beginning of the book.

Of course Cross ends up leaving when his old boss tracks him down because of some really big thing that’s going down somewhere and all of the other Big Cats are dead. OR ARE THEY?

Everything that follows is arbitrary and/or predictable, rendered in prose that’s either tediously effortful or just boring. Action scenes and sex scenes alternate with dull, dialogue-driven expository sections. One thing happens after another for no reason and the story has no shape or coherence. Cross will be superhuman and untouchable until the plot needs him to be captured and then he’s brought down by, literally, a small child.

By the time the big deal scheme is revealed, you probably wouldn’t have cared no matter what it was, but it’s a mundane, unimaginative anticlimax anyway.

The evolution of men’s adventure fiction and its takeover of English-language popular culture, much in the manner of an invasive species, is an interesting and under-studied phenomenon. Much of it is very entertaining and at least diverting and I would argue that a lot of it very good. If you like Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Marvel movies, Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies and so on, then you like those examples of men’s adventure fiction.

Jaguar Lives! belongs to the same genre but has really nothing to recommend it. The author apparently expected Pavlovian or fetishistic responses from the readers just by waving generic conventions at them. But one way or another, when it works, it works because we’ve been moved to invest care in the characters and situations and this is something they earn from us, not something we give away for free.

The first line is “A large hawk cut circles in the purple of the New Mexico sky”.