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Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

For people of my generation, Jumanji is one of those titles that's remembered fondly. It's right up there Jingle All the Way and Space Jam. Like those films, and many TV shows of that specific period, it's also a film I just didn't care about. I was just old enough when Jumanji came out that a kids' film about a board game didn't really appeal. I missed the cut-off to be into the film by just a couple of years.

I've seen the original Jumanji, having caught it at some later date just to see what all the fuss was about (I wasn't impressed). Thus, when Hollywood decided to revisit the property to try and loop in all the adults that grew up with the film, along with their kids, for a kinda-sorta sequel, I didn't really care about that either. Sure, it has a big, A-list cast -- The Rock, Karen Gillan, Jack Black, and Kevin Hart -- but all the big stars and CGI isn't going to make me see a film that's a sequel (at least in concept) to another movie that bored me. I was not the target audience.

Still, I know there are people that love the original film, and the sequel (and it's sequel) did beaucoup bucks at the Box Office (each coming within spitting distance of $1 Bil). And, really, a movie about board games and video games is the exact kind of subject matter I should be covering for this site. So, with all the buzz about the movies done and people hardly talking about Jumanji once more, it seems like the perfect time for me to finally watch this sequel. And, hey, it wasn't completely terrible.

The film starts in 1995 with a kid, Alex Vreeke (Mason Guccione), getting a weird board game from his beech-comber dad. The game, of course, is Jumanji, but Alex has no interest in it, instead wanting to play his PlayStation. Jumanji, though, knows how to lure kids in and, overnight, transforms itself into a video game cartridge. Alex, being an idiot, pops it into his weird, off-brand machine and then cut to the modern day.

Here we meet our actual protagonists: nerdy Spencer Gilpin (Alex Wolff), hulking football player Anthony "Fridge" Johnson (Ser'Darius Blain), burgeoning influencer Bethany Walker (Madison Iseman), and anti-social Martha Kaply (Morgan Turner). Each, for one reason or another, ends up in detention, forced to clean up the school after hours. There they find that old game machine, with Jumanji still in it and, of course, they decide to play. They then get sucked into the game -- Spencer as Dr. Xander "Smolder" Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson), Fridge as Franklin "Mouse" Finbar (Kevin Hart), Bethany as Professor Sheldon "Shelly" Oberon (Jack Black), and Martha as Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan) -- and they have to find a way back out. This will require them to use their skills, and teamwork, to complete the quest of Jumanji: take the stolen Eye of the Jaguar, a powerful gem, and return it to the statue at the center of the island before evil forces kill them all.

In concept, this new Jumanji is the opposite version of the original film. Where that one had the actions of the board game play out in the real world, here the characters from the real world have to work within the rules of the video game. It's like if we'd followed Robin William's Alan Parrish in the first movie into the board game and watched his adventures there instead out out in the real world. Credit to the producers, it is at least a different kind of adventure from the first film. No doubt about that.

And the thing is, as much as this film is billed as a reboot, it goes out of its way to reference Alan Parrish more than once. It's very much a sequel, but that also means it has to follow the same rules and this one doesn't quite. When Alan went into the board game the first time, he came back out older, bearded, and having lost a lot of his life to Jumanji. Without spoiling anything here, that doesn't happen this time around. Sure, the first game played with time loops and other weird coincidences to justify its storytelling, but that just means the concept of this fantasy world isn't entirely consistent across films and that bothers me. Don't set up rules if you can just break them later.

On that front, at least this film is internally consistent. If you ignore the original movie, all the rules set up here do work. The film gives each character powers and abilities they can use, from Mouse being a zoologist and, thus, knows all about animals and can even control them a little, to two of the characters being accomplished adventurers, and Shelly's map reading skills only working for Shelly and no one else. All the characters are useful and each get to put their abilities to the test when it counts.

That includes the very concept of lives. Since they're in a video game, the players all have lives (three, to be exact) and they have to be careful with them (as, one would assume, they'd die for real once they run out). The movie sets it up, though, that each of those lives actually counts for something, and you can expect that every person will leave the game with just one life left (all the rifles over the fireplace fired, as they should). Every time you see a rule get set up you can be assured it will pay off properly.

I appreciate the verisimilitude to the concept, and that's one of the strongest parts off the film. That, and the actors being dedicated to their roles. Each of the actors within the game -- Rock, Gillan, Hart, and Black -- have to play the character within the character, and they do it really well. I liked how Dr. Bravestone played as a send up of the Rock's own persona, but he also got to play a character that's the opposite from his normal heroic duties. He was nerdy and afraid when the Rock is usually big and bold. Gillan got to send up her action heroine cred, putting a pin on all her time as Nebula. And there's Black, who absolutely gets lost in the role of a teenage girl to the point you stop seeing Jack Black. The one weak note is Kevin Hart, who plays Kevin Hart, and that's as far as his character goes. Still, the rest of the cast is great.

The film also sets it up so that each player takes a character that can teach them vital lessons. Because Bravestone has to be the hero, Spencer has to learn what the means and use that to get over his own fears. Fridge has to learn what it's like to be a smaller guy such that he can't just rely on his size to get things done. Sure, its four characters set into four other characters and its easy to say, "hey, the pretty influencer has to learn something by being inside Jack Black," but the film doesn't just play it as one-note. There's depth to the characters and their story that makes their eventually pay offs really work.

With that being said, the story around the characters is pretty bland. The quest is basically "take this McGuffin to that location" without anything thrilling or essential added on. The characters don't learn anything about themselves when they return the gem as it's the steps along the way and not the quest itself that mattered. The end goal needed to tie into them better, and it didn't. That's a lot like the villain of the piece, Van Pelt (Bobby Cannavale), who is just a one-note, evil looking NPC. If, maybe, he'd been a player who had lost their lives in the game and was fighting against the rules to make their way back out, breaking the world and stealing its items to further his goals, that would have worked within the story. A generic villain, though, does nothing and adds nothing except a means to an end. We needed more.

Still, on the whole I'd call this a pretty successful movie. The actors are fun, and have a lot of fun with it, adding to the humor and adventure of the script itself. The lack of depth in the plot is made up by the depth in the characters, and it all ties nicely into the game world in general. There's enough here that in a sequel (which already exists), we could get more and varied storytelling that builds and expands on what's presented here. Thus, in most of the ways that count this is a pretty solid film. Sequel or not, the name Jumanji actually got the treatment it deserved.