Sunday, January 28, 2018

Review: Jumanji (1995)

Jumanji (1995)

Rated PG for menacing fantasy action and some mild language

Score: 3 out of 5

It feels strange that Jumanji, a fantasy adventure film from the '90s, has stood the test of time in popular culture while many of its contemporaries have been forgotten, such that it got a sequel over twenty years later that proved to be a far bigger hit than the original. It's not like it's a great film; the special effects really don't hold up, the kid characters feel like adults in child bodies, and its mix of slapstick comedy and poignant, surprisingly dark moments can feel jarring at times. Something tells me it's the enduring appeal of the late, great Robin Williams at the height of his powers that has kept this film so well-remembered, especially given that his performance is at least half of what makes it work. It's a very uneven film that wears its '90s-ness on its sleeve, for better or worse, but that doesn't stop it from being a very charming one all the same. It's a movie that I loved as a kid, and one that I'd still recommend to parents nowadays, provided that their kids are at least in late elementary school.

The titular "character" of Jumanji is a magical board game that, in 1869, gets buried in the woods by the last people who played it, hoping to God that nobody ever finds it again. Sure enough, that's what happens in 1969, when it's discovered at a construction site by Alan Parrish, the young son of a wealthy shoe factory owner who's picked on by bullies and is considering running away from home, feeling that his father cares more about his son's social status (including planning on sending him off to a prestigious boarding school) than about what he wants. He and a friend named Sarah play the newly-discovered board game, and Alan soon learns that he needs to be careful what he wishes for, as he winds up sucked into the game and forced to survive in the jungle while Sarah gets chased out of the house by a swarm of bats that the game spawned. Fast-forward to 1995, when a new family moves into the Parrish house, composed of the siblings Judy and Peter, who just lost their parents in a skiing accident, and their aunt Nora. The kids discover the board game that Alan and Sarah had been playing all those years ago, attracted to it, as Alan was, by the sound of jungle drums emanating from it in the attic that, somehow, only they can hear. As they play it, they too get caught up in a world of wild animals, monsoons, killer vines, and a great white hunter named Van Pelt (who bears an unmistakable resemblance to Alan's father) -- and Alan, released from the game after twenty-six years, having become a Tarzan-esque wild man of the jungle in the process. Together with Sarah, who's spent years of therapy trying to forget what she saw playing the game as a kid, Judy, Peter, and Alan must see the game through until there is a winner, if only to undo the damage it caused in the form of the creatures it unleashed who are now wreaking havoc on the town.

The simplest way to describe this movie's tone is "bipolar". Over the course of its runtime, it frequently swings from moments of animals gone wild to moments exploring Alan's backstory, alternating between zany slapstick comedy in the former and some downright depressing scenes in the latter. The movie does not sugarcoat what Alan goes through: he learns that, in the twenty-six years he was gone, his father's shoe company went out of business as Dad sunk his fortune into a futile effort to find his missing son (proving that he did love Alan after all), leaving the town economically depressed, while his childhood friend Sarah is now a shut-in who works from home as a phony psychic. It's these scenes, particularly Robin Williams playing his "serious" mode, that work to elevate the film into something a bit more meaningful than you'd expect from an effects-driven family film. While Williams made his name as a comedy star, he became just as famous for his dramatic chops late in his life, and he gets to show off both sides of his talent here, playing someone who's effectively a manchild who gets to have fun in action scenes while still carrying the film's surprisingly meaty dramatic core. Unfortunately, for every two steps forward the movie takes here, it takes one step back through its drastic changes in tone, feeling the need to lean heavily on CGI animals that, twenty years later, do not look nearly as impressive as the filmmakers must've thought they did so long ago. (The monkeys especially feel pulled out of a video game -- from the year this came out.) It feels like two movies awkwardly sewn together, one of them a dark, yet in the end uplifting, film about a childhood lost (in short, the Pixar or Studio Ghibli version of this), and the other being the sort of low-brow, empty-calorie blockbuster that it was marketed as.

As for the rest of the movie, it's pretty serviceable. Shaky special effects aside, the action and mayhem in this are a blast to watch, as wild animals from Africa and the Amazon run wild over a small New England town; if nothing else, the film delivers on what it promises. Bonnie Hunt was fun to watch as Sarah, who thought she put that damned game behind her and is not at all pleased when she sees Alan again, as are Bradley Pierce and a young Kirsten Dunst as the kids Peter and Judy, even if the writing for them ironically made them come across as more adult than Williams' jungle-man Alan. Seriously, Judy's dialogue especially, concerning the recent death of her and her brother's parents, is way too morbid for a kid her age, especially not one who isn't written as a goth or otherwise into "dark" things. Jonathan Hyde was likewise having a blast as both Alan's father in the prologue and as Van Pelt, the film's main human antagonist, a pith-helmeted big-game hunter who swaps his lever-action rifle for something a bit more modern when he gets to 1995. I almost didn't realize they were played by the same actor until I saw the credits, such was the distinction between the classy-yet-cold Mr. Parrish and the brutal Van Pelt; I guess you could say it carries some emotional resonance for Alan, the game playing on his feelings towards his father in crafting a villain for him in the jungle, though the film sadly didn't do enough to explore this.

The Bottom Line

The two halves of the film don't go together very well, but one of them is a very fun family comedy adventure and the other one is a surprisingly thoughtful version of the same. Don't fear that nostalgia and the death of Williams have made you overrate this one too badly -- while it does show its age in spots, it still (mostly) holds up.

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