Monday, December 16, 2019

Review: Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)

Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)

Rated PG-13 for adventure action, suggestive content and some language

Score: 3 out of 5

So, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle was a welcome surprise, wasn't it? Even without the most iconic element of the original film, Robin Williams' performance, it made up for it with a great cast, a fun sense of humor, and a more sure-footed tone than its predecessor to add up to a better film all around. It was a workmanlike, yet very well-made action-adventure movie that we probably all needed at the end of 2017. Jumanji: The Next Level promises more of the same, with some cosmetic twists on the basic setup but much the same premise at its heart, and it mostly delivers. It's not quite as tightly put together as the first, but it still holds together as an entertaining two-hour joyride of a film, with some nice exploration of the pressures of growing up and moving beyond one's teenage years that honestly hit rather close to home for me. If Welcome to the Jungle defied expectations by being a high-quality nostalgic revival, then this one did the same by being a comedy sequel that was actually good.

After the last film, the four teenagers who got sucked into the world of Jumanji have all gone their separate ways but tried to remain in touch. Fridge still plays football, Bethany is doing charity work overseas, and Spencer and Martha are in a long-distance relationship now that the former is going to NYU, a relationship that clearly isn't working. Spencer returns home to meet up with his old friends, and finds that his grandfather Eddie has moved back in, recovering from hip surgery and getting into bitter arguments with his old friend Milo. Spencer, whose life isn't going so well and who feels that he's heading nowhere, looks back fondly on his experience as the impossibly cool Smolder Bravestone in Jumanji, and so he dredges up the old console and gets it working again, hoping to relive that adventure. The next day, Fridge, Martha, and Bethany wonder where Spencer is, and discover that old video game device in his basement -- just in time for it to suck Fridge and Martha back into the game, along with both Eddie and Milo.

The game has been heavily remixed since last time, with Martha being the only one still playing with her old avatar, Ruby Roundhouse. This time, Fridge, the energetic and competitive jock, has been dropped into the body of the rotund professor Shelly Oberon, while Eddie and Milo, both grumpy old men, have become the action hero Smolder Bravestone and the zoologist Mouse Finbar. The core cast is back, but save for Karen Gillan, all of them are playing near polar opposites of their characters in the original. Johnson is no longer a scrawny nerd in a jacked-up body, but an old, frail man who can now not only walk normally, but kick the ass of everybody who looks at him funny. He not only does a great impression of Danny DeVito (who appears briefly in the "real world" in the first act and is a welcome sight when he does), but that persona, when combined with the fact that he's in a body thirty years younger and with five times the muscle mass, makes him feel less like Johnson's usual persona and more like a guy who just stepped out of a '70s Noo Yawk gangster flick and is ready to start beating on slimeballs. Kevin Hart's Danny Glover impression, too, was a major leap, and he did a great job selling the impossibly smooth old man who never says "I'm too old for this shit" but who you just know could easily drop that line at any moment. Jack Black playing Fridge, a hyped-up football player with no indoor voice, was as funny as him playing a phone-obsessed teenage girl in the last movie, somebody who once more got the short end of the stick in the world of Jumanji and can't perform the physical feats he can in real life.

Awkwafina is the new addition to the cast as Ming Fleetfoot, the avatar that it turns out Spencer was dropped into this time, and she steals the show, especially late in the film thanks to a great gag that lets her show off her range. As Spencer himself notes, being given this avatar feels like the game is mocking him; he wanted to be Smolder Bravestone again, but instead, he got dropped into the body of an avatar who is meant to hide in the shadows and whose weakness is that she has a pollen allergy. And it's with Spencer-as-Ming's arc that the film's themes start to come out. At its heart, this is a movie about growing up and moving beyond one's old fixations, accepting that things probably weren't as good as you remember them. Spencer kicks off the entire plot by digging up and repairing the Jumanji console, wanting to relive a moment in his life that he already wistfully remembers as his glory days, only for it to turn comically sour. Eddie and Milo, too, start the movie bickering about the restaurant they used to own together, only to be forced to reconcile their differences -- something that we learn Milo was trying to do the whole time. If the film has a message, it's that fixating on the past is no way to live and can quickly become dangerous, and can stop somebody from growing as a person. It feels odd seeing this message in the sequel to a revival of a nostalgic '90s property, of all places, but it's one that I appreciated, especially given my sympathy for Spencer's position of feeling stuck in his life.

The film itself does admittedly feel stuck repeating what worked before, however. It's a common pitfall of comedy sequels to retread the formula while undermining the things that worked before by adding new fluff, and while this film largely avoids the latter problem and comes out all the better for it, it shines that much more of a spotlight on the former problem. In terms of action and adventure, a lot of the film feels recycled from the first, especially as far as the central plot is concerned; while there have been a few new twists added owing to the fact that Spencer's reconstruction of the game wasn't perfect, I do believe they could've gone further, especially with the way Spencer notes that it felt like the game was messing with him. The villain, instead of yet another "generic evil conqueror" that even the film notes is a video game cliche, could've been someone specifically designed to play to the fears of the characters, both Spencer in terms of him being afraid to grow up and Eddie and Milo in terms of their looming mortality. Maybe have Jurgen the Brutal be on a search for immortality that would let him escape death, or a quest to restore some kind of idealized, mythic fantasy that would be brutal for everyone else but great for him, or perhaps both. That would have made him a great villain for these characters, and given them a goal beyond just "get out of the game" like before. Some of the jokes involving Eddie and Milo being clueless about video games also started to wear thin before long, especially given that it's a pretty deep well of material that it felt like they barely scratched the surface of. They could've instead had memories of their kids and grandkids growing up playing PlayStation (the film was made by Sony Pictures, so the cross-brand synergy opportunity was right there), and their vague knowledge of games from the '80s and '90s could clash with the world of modern gaming. Or, you could have them turn out to be Wii enthusiasts like a lot of elderly people were ten years ago (though see above re: Sony Pictures).

The Bottom Line

A fun and amusing blockbuster for the holiday season with plenty of thrills and laughs and a nice message, even if it felt like it could've been a bit more ambitious. If you liked the first one, you'll like this too.

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