Review: Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)

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

Score: 4 out of 5

Years-later nostalgia sequels/reboots are not normally supposed to be this good. Independence Day: Resurgence bombed, the Ghostbusters reboot fiercely polarized audiences before it even entered theaters, and the 2017 remake of The Mummy never escaped the shadow of the 1999 Stephen Sommers/Brendan Fraser film, let alone the 1932 Boris Karloff classic. One exception, though, bucked the trend and stood out above all the rest: 2017's Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. The original Jumanji is a film that I feel stands the test of time chiefly because of the late Robin Williams, whose performance was enough to offset its awkward tone and dated effects; in other words, a good film, but one that could probably be improved with a remake even if it meant losing the one thing everybody remembered about it. That said, given the track record of Sony Pictures with handling these sorts of nostalgia properties in the recent past, including the aforementioned Ghostbusters reboot, expectations were low. Nobody foresaw this becoming the box-office juggernaut that it was, going toe-to-toe with a new Star Wars movie, walking away with nearly a billion dollars, immediately sparking talk of a third Jumanji film, and enshrining Dwayne Johnson's status as Hollywood's top action hero.

But everybody involved earned it, by making a film that honored the original while improving on it in key ways, all wrapped up in a plot conceit that immediately afforded them room for the wildest stunts and effects. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is still, at the end of the day, a fairly middle-brow Hollywood blockbuster product that doesn't really rise to greatness or even aspire to it to begin with. But while it's not great, it's really, really, really good, a pure thrill ride mixing extravagant effects, hilarious one-liners, interesting characters, a great cast, and an affectionate sendup of adventure games like Tomb Raider and Uncharted, all while having at least the semblance of some real heart and soul. This is not a "necessary" film by any stretch, but for two hours, I had a blast with it and it left a smile on my face. Good times will be had by all watching this, I guarantee.

The setup here is that, after the events of the original film, the Jumanji board game is found washed up on a beach in 1996 by one Alex Vreeke, a "radical" '90s kid who loves heavy metal and video games in equal measure. He brings it home but leaves it to collect dust, thinking that board games are for kids and old fogies, and so the Jumanji board responds by transforming into a video game console, one that sucks him into it once he fires it up. Twenty years later, four high school students, the gamer Spencer, the jock Fridge, the queen bee Bethany, and the nerd Martha, are all assigned detention together, and while carrying out the busywork they were given, they find an old, dusty video game console in the storeroom. They plug it in, select their characters, and they too find themselves lost in the world of Jumanji, forced into a quest to stop the bad guy and beat the game if they want to return home.

The big gimmick here is that, when these teenagers enter the world of Jumanji, they're not inhabiting their normal human bodies. Rather, they've turned into the avatars they selected, who just so happen to correspond to the exact opposites of their personalities. The shy outcasts Spencer and Martha are respectively turned into Smolder Bravestone and Ruby Roundhouse, the former a hunky, charismatic Indiana Jones/Nathan Drake figure and the latter a scantily-clad riff on Lara Croft with dance-inspired combat moves. Fridge, a towering football player, becomes Franklin "Mouse" Finbar, a zoologist half his size who is the least physically adept of the four protagonists. Finally, Bethany, the Instagram selfie queen, reacts with utter horror when she discovers that the "curvy genius" Shelly Oberon is actually an overweight, middle-aged man. The casting of Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, Kevin Hart, and Jack Black in these roles gives them all great opportunities to send up their personas (Johnson the tough guy, Gillan the geek sex symbol, Hart the short funny man, Black the overweight funny man), mainly by playing people who are the polar opposite of them personality-wise, stuffed awkwardly into their bodies and forced to manage. Black is easily the comic standout as Bethany, a role that could've easily turned into a campy, annoying, one-note joke like in the old Rob Schneider movie The Hot Chick (ha ha, it's the fat guy acting like a hot teenage girl!) but who manages to mine far more from it, not just in terms of humor but in actual character development, especially through Bethany's interactions with Gillan's Martha as she learns to adjust to suddenly being the hottest girl in the room. Spencer and Fridge, meanwhile, find their friendship in the real world, a deeply unequal one in which Fridge pushed Spencer around and all but forced him to do his homework for him, suddenly reversed now that Spencer is in the body of The Rock and can send Fridge, who now looks like Kevin Hart, into space with a single punch. And without spoiling anything, when Alex, now in the handsome body of Nick Jonas, shows up again, the culture shock between his '90s self and the other, more modern teenagers is played for some good laughs (even if there are some anachronisms). The humor is kept focused squarely on the character interactions, getting the easy jokes out of the way quickly and moving on to how these kids adjust to their new station in the world of Jumanji. Not only were all the actors downright hilarious in their parts, it felt like they were playing actual characters rather than just action figures, each of them learning hard lessons about growing up over the course of the film. This film may not have Robin Williams, but each member of its ensemble comes close, and together, they're even greater than the sum of their parts.

The real improvements over the original Jumanji came chiefly in the tone. Lacking the whiplash of that film, this one is far more adept at managing and melding its humorous moments with its more serious ones, leaning more heavily on the former but still managing to have some real stakes to it. The result is a film that feels like a love letter to generations' worth of adventure movies and especially video games, with the logic of gaming, especially the older games from the '90s that this one is riffing on, regularly exploited for big laughs. The characters can all perform ridiculous feats, compensated with really weaksauce weaknesses that include mosquito bites and cake, and they each get three lives, initially leading them to treat themselves as invincible -- which bites them in the rear later on as they fall back on their last lives (and wow, I just realized the metaphor of them wasting their lives). The action scenes go for broke, every departure from reality immediately justified to anybody who's played these sorts of games, with special effects and exotic vistas that together made me feel as though I'd been dropped into another world right alongside the protagonists, one based on real life but exaggerated enough to feel like an exotic landscape that could only exist in a game.

The only real weaknesses came in the fact that, good humor and thrilling action aside, the film is fairly shallow and won't really surprise you. Beyond the main characters' journey, the story is as thinly-written as anything in a '90s video game, from Bobby Cannavale's over-the-top, scenery-chewing villain to the fact that the non-player characters eventually start repeating their lines once the protagonists speak to them for too long. I get that that was the entire point, but given not only the supernatural nature of the Jumanji game, but also some real-life video games that have played around with the tropes of gaming, I think this movie could've gone a bit further with its video-game-world setting and its parody of such. A great joke would've been if Spencer's knowledge of gaming, which helps carry the main characters through much of the film, starts to falter in the face of some of the twists that Jumanji throws at them, forcing him and the other main characters to improvise, a la Indiana Jones. The same is true of the characters themselves, who are elevated chiefly by the actors and the central gimmick rather than the writing. This is especially true of Alex, whose arc is largely a retread of Alan's from the original film, and while it does a pretty good job of revising a lot of the best parts of such, it didn't hit quite as well as it did the first time. It's the one point where the original is indisputably superior, as Alex felt more like a gimmick and an homage to the original than a truly fleshed-out character in his own right.

The Bottom Line

Far better than it had any right to be, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is exactly the movie it promises, nothing more, nothing less. Whether you're a nostalgic twentysomething, a kid, a parent of a kid, or just someone looking for a fun action-comedy, this movie does the job and then some.