A JOURNEY WORTH THE WAIT
Jumanji a fun jungle throwback
There’s a rule in Hollywood that the longer a film has been the subject of rumours, in turnaround and under development, the worse the eventual result.
But there are a few movies that break that rule, and the new Jumanji, in the works since at least 2012, is just such a rare beast. It is mild, shaggy and diverting; throw in a commercial break every 15 minutes, and one could imagine giving over a Saturday afternoon to its charms, 20 or more years ago.
That’s when it begins. It’s 1996, or about a year after the original Jumanji, which starred Robin Williams and some poorly rendered CG monkeys.
The haunted board game has been found by another family, but the kid is into those newfangled video games and puts it aside.
Undeterred, it morphs into a grey plastic cartridge and, when
he plugs it into his game system, sucks him into its world.
Cut to the present day and a quartet of high-schoolers, thrown together in detention (shades of Breakfast Club), finds the console in a dusty antechamber. Before you can say “Konami Code,” into the game they go. But they arrive to discover they’re inhabiting adult avatars. The nerdy kid is now Dwayne Johnson; the football player is tiny Kevin Hart; the anti-social girl looks like Karen Gillan, dressed like a tomb raider; and the hot girl is now, through some kind of karmic humour, Jack Black.
Directed by Jake Kasdan, and written by a quartet of scribes whose credits run the gamut from TV sitcoms to superhero movies, Welcome to the Jungle wrings much gentle humour from the kids’ reactions to their new bodies — just imagine if you were suddenly The Rock, able to crank your right eyebrow into the stratosphere. Although the best-response prize must go to Black’s character, Bethany, who can’t get over her own new equipment: “The fact that I’m not Instagramming this right now is insane!”
Mild naughty humour aside, Jumanji is a pretty tame ride; the violence is about what you’d expect from a ’90s-era video game, as the players face off against various carnivores and a pack of cartoonish, motorcycleriding bad guys, in search of a glowing green MacGuffin.
They also do battle with the laws of physics, and win every time. Tension is created when they learn that the mysterious three-bar tattoos on their arms represent how many lives they have left in the game; no one is certain what happens if you use them up, but no one wants to find out, either.
Bobby Cannavale, Rhys Darby and a few others show up as ingame characters, which means their interactions are limited; this is one time when wooden performances are truly admirable. And the main characters deserve credit for believably channelling their inner selves: Black is completely credible as a teenaged girl; Johnson as a guy who would struggle to open a box of Wheaties. And when Gillan tries to act sexy as a distraction to some guards, she resembles a wounded gazelle.
It all adds up to a very appealing and worthy sequel to the rather more frantic original, and manages to maintain a kind of ’90s vibe, not least in Henry Jackman’s bouncy score.
It even makes a virtue of its video-game setting, with cutscenes that explain the plot, lush Hawaiian backdrops, and riddles and puzzles right out of Myst. That’s a classic puzzle game which, if you’re old enough to remember with some nostalgia, might put you right in the target demographic for this delightful throwback.