“The Game Has Evolved”
Directed by Jake Kasdan
Starring Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Nick Jonas and Bobby Cannavale
The Original
Years after a boy is sucked into a mysterious board game, two more children find the game and begin to play. In order to avoid getting trapped themselves, they must play the game to the end, and in the process learn some important lessons about themselves.
The Late Sequel
In 1996 a teenager finds, but sets aside the Jumanji board game. To lure him in, it becomes a computer game. Twenty years later, four mismatched students – nerdy gamer Spencer (Alex Wolff), jock Fridge (Ser’Darius Blain), queen bee Bethany (Madison Iseman) and angry young woman Martha (Morgan Turner) – are given detention and tasked with clearing out old papers from the basement. There they find the game, and it pulls them in.
Transformed into the game characters – Spencer into explorer Dr Smoulder Bravestone (Johnson), Fridge into diminutive zoologist ‘Mouse’ Finbar (Hart), Bethany into polymath Dr Sheldon ‘Shelly’ Oberon (Black) and Martha into ill-clad martial artist Ruby Roundhouse (Gillan) – they are tasked with completing the game’s quest in order to return home. To do this, however, they need to find ‘the missing piece’ – fifth explorer ‘Seaplane’ McDonough, the avatar of Alex, the missing teenager from 1996 – and overcome supernatural villain Van Pelt (Cannavale).
What’s wrong with it?
The film obviously departs from the original by using the device of the Avatars, which means that the young characters get somewhat sidelined, although this is more true in one case than in others.
As in the original, the quality of the CGI Is variable.
Kevin Hart is just such a let down in comparison to the rest of the cast. I’ll talk about them more below, but Hart is just playing his usual screen persona. It’s a weak performance, failing to convey anything of Fridge’s younger self.
‘Baby I Love Your Way’ is a terrible song to dance-fight to.
Van Pelt is just blandly diabolical, rather than the direct, Oedipal threat of the original.
What’s right with it?
Apart from Hart, the adult leads are superb. Dwayne Johnson conveys Spencer’s wonder and curiosity, Karen Gillan Martha’s awkwardness and anger, and Jack Black seems to have been born to play a teenage valley girl in his own body.
One of the subplots has Bethany – in Oberon’s body – attracted to Seaplane. This is played with a truly incredible lack of homophobia, even when she is called to deliver mouth to mouth resuscitation in order to transfer one of her lives to him.
The video game nature of the world is beautifully conveyed through the actions of the NPCs, who can only repeat the same stock phrases over and over, and have limited response to nuanced stimuli, and the intrusion of a flashback scene which Spencer recognises as a cut-scene. The video game physics are also superbly done.
How bad is it really?
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is an excellent adventure movie, and if it has a problem it is that even a self-aware civilised saviour narrative with a non-white lead is a civilised saviour narrative. It’s honestly surprisingly good fun, and Black, Johnson and Gillan have a whale of a time playing out the high school relationships.
Best bit (if such there is)?
The denouement of the movie does an excellent job of giving everyone a shot at being cool, and I particularly enjoyed Martha’s clever manipulation of the game’s respawn mechanic.
What’s up with…?
- The school’s zero-supervision policy on detentions? What if there was a fire? Or a flood? Or if the students got sucked into a video game? If anyone hadn’t made it out, that would have been it for the inspirational head teacher’s career.
- The game’s mechanics? I’m pretty sure that Jumani is a video game that functions purely through quick-time events.
Ratings
Production values – Jumanji belongs to that class of film where the CGI will probably look pretty shaky in a few years, but for now it holds up okay. 7
Dialogue and performances – It’s the performances of the leads that really makes this film pop, but unfortunately one of the four (and a half; the fact that we never really see Seaplane as a teen limits his impact) cornerstones is sorely lacking. 8
Plot and execution – The main plot is a straightforward succession of set-pieces, but on the other hand, that’s the point. As with the original Jumanji, the real meat of the story is not the jungle shenanigans, but the personal drama between the leads, and this is handled amazingly well for what is essentially a film with five grown actors playing teenagers. 6
Randomness – The film’s premise excuses a certain amount of randomness, and aside from the gross professional negligence which allows the plot to take place at all, it’s all in keeping with the video game setting. 4
Waste of potential – Welcome to the Jungle is a late sequel to a much loved film, with a cheesy premise tweak and an action upgrade. There is little reason it would have been this much fun. 4
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