directed by Jake Kasdan
written by Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Scott Rosenberg and Jeff Pinkner
Having stayed away from the movies since the 2017 Metro Manila Film Festival put a two-week embargo on foreign movies starting last Christmas and just ending last Monday, I was happy to kick off the year with a pleasant little distraction in the form of Jake Kasdan's Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.
The story kicks off in 1996, just around the time the story of the original movie ended. Someone walking along a beach in New Hampshire discovers the Jumanji board game half-buried in the sand and takes it home, giving it to his son, a teenage video-game addict, who ignores it scornfully. Overnight, the game transforms into a video game cartridge. The next morning, the teen tries out the game, with weird and surprising results.
Twenty-one years later, in the same town, four high school kids, for various reasons, are punished with detention. The nerdy video-game nut Spencer (Alex Wolff) and his former friend-turned-football-jock Fridge (Ser'Darius Blain) get detention because the former was caught doing the latter's school paper, the rebellious Martha (Morgan Turner) gets detention for refusing to participate in physical education class and then insulting the teacher, while the self-absorbed Bethany (Madison Iseman) is punished for making a mobile phone call in the middle of her class and then giving her teacher sass about it. While the four are serving their sentence, which involves them removing staples from old magazines in the school's old storeroom, Spencer discovers an old gaming console with the Jumanji cartridge stuck in it. He talks the other kids into briefly playing the game with him, whereupon all four of themselves find themselves magically and mysteriously transported into the game itself, and into the bodies of their game avatars. Normally scrawny Spencer becomes all-around-hero Dr. Smolder Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson), normally hulking Fridge becomes the diminutive zoologist-cum-weapons valet Mouse (mistakenly read as Moose) Finbar (Kevin Hart), the normally shy and reclusive Martha becomes the scantily-clad, ass-kicking bombshell Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan) and the normally slim and attractive Bethany becomes the bespectacled, portly map expert Sheldon "Shelly" Oberon (Jack Black). There, the four learn that to escape the game, they must win it, and that involves returning a jewel called the Jaguar's Eye to the massive Jaguar sculpture from which it was stolen by explorer Russel Van Pelt (Bobby Cannavale). This task will be easier said than done considering the perils that await them, including Van Pelt's armed goons, lethal wild animals, and Van Pelt himself.
Now, the original Jumanji was a curious thing; it had all the ingredients of an entertaining box-office smash. It was a fantasy movie that starred the late Robin Williams at the height of his box-office drawing power (two years earlier he had starred in Mrs. Doubtfire, which made, in adjusted dollars, the kind of money that is usually only reserved these days for Marvel and Star Wars movies). It featured a whole lot of computer-generated animals just two years after Jurassic Park had shown everyone how cool CGI monsters could be. It was directed by Joe Johnston (Captain America: The First Avenger), who knew his way around effects-laden, comedic blockbusters, having helmed the highly successful Honey, I Shrunk the Kids a few years earlier and who had spent much of his career working on the original Star Wars trilogy.
For all of that, however, it was a movie that can charitably be described as awful. Williams was painfully unfunny thanks to a script that can best be described as insipid, and the CGI was, in a word, grotesque. It looked like bargain-basement stuff, even for that era.
As a result, it was with a groan and eye-rolling that I greeted the possibility of a sequel, especially considering that it starred Hollywood's premier franchise inheritor/hijacker, Dwayne-"Journey-2-the-Mysterious-Island"-Johnson. What the heck was so compelling about the original that it even merited a sequel 22 years after the fact? It didn't even make that much money back in the day.
I have to admit, though, that the first trailer had me intrigued and that, unlike its progenitor, this film looked genuinely funny.
Having seen it, I can say that, while not all of the jokes hit home, and while some of them were a little overdone, this film was a genuine riot.
Unlike the first film, which was basically all about the peril that the characters found themselves in from scene to scene with the occasional forced laugh (and none of them courtesy of Williams), this movie gives its actors quite a bit of comedic material to work with by employing the classic body-swapping (or more appropriately body-displacing) story trope. Watching Dwayne Johnson play a nerd and Jack Black play a self-absorbed teenage girl was particularly delightful, even as Kevin Hart and Karen Gillan also entertained me, albeit to a lesser degree in their respective out-of-body roles. Of course, they went pretty broad with their performances, probably crossing boundaries of political correctness in some cases (probably mostly Jack Black's) but I doubt any but the most hard-boiled Social Justice Warriors will run after this movie, even though, with Gillan's skimpy outfit, it does kind of want to have its self-aware cake and eat it too.
Also, it's worth noting that the filmmakers noticeably stepped up the production value of this film, with this movie going on location (it was filmed in Hawaii) among other things. The CGI is still far from the top-of-the-line stuff, and the filmmakers notably resorted to the time-honored cheat of having most of the CGI take place during the night so as to obscure any flaws in the effects, but it was definitely an improvement over the awful work on display in the 1995 film.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that by itself, this movie isn't really all that exceptional. It's entertaining, it's funny, but it's ultimately fluff. It is, like I said at the outset, a pleasant enough distraction.
Next to the 1995 movie, though, this film is nothing short of a masterpiece. I'd actually argue that it deserves some kind of "biggest improvement over the original" award.
7/10
