Comic stars lead Jumanji reboot to surprisingly OK journey to the jungle
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
K (out of 4) Starring Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Karen Gillan, Nick Jonas and Bobby Cannavale. Directed by Jake Kasdan. Opens Wednesday at GTA theatres. 119 minutes. PG A sequel hardly seemed inevitable for Jumanji, the 1995 comic adventure about a children’s board game that magically turns into a rampaging zoo.
Lead star Robin Williams is dead, child star Kirsten Dunst is all grown up and board games are so 20th century.
But where there’s a brand name to exploit, there’s a way. Hence we get Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, a sort-of sequel that updates the game to a multi-player video diversion, circa 1990s technology, and boasts not one but four comic stars: Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black and Guardians of the Galaxy’s Karen Gillan.
And it’s surprisingly OK, largely due to the likability factor of the four leads.
They’re willing to do just about anything for a laugh, which includes sexchange jokes and riffs about Johnson’s “smouldering intensity.”
This is more of an adult-oriented laugher than the original Jumanji, which attracted deserved criticism for showing children in peril.
Directed by Jake Kasdan ( Bad Teacher) and scripted by committee, Welcome to the Jungle takes place mostly within Jumanji’s tropical forest environment, another change from the first film. The CGI also gets an upgrade, but not so much as to inspire awe.
Set in modern times, but with a 1996 prologue that awkwardly shows how the game morphed from board to screen, the movie unspools like The Breakfast Club crossed with Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Four high schoolers who otherwise wouldn’t have anything to do with each other are brought together for a detention: nerdy snowflake Spencer (Alex Wolff ), football jock Fridge (Ser’Darius Blain), Instagram girl Bethany (Madison Iseman) and brainy introvert Martha (Morgan Turner).
They find and play the Jumanji game, and as fortune has it, they’re sucked into it as adult avatars with multiple special skills (and also weaknesses).
Spencer (Johnson) becomes a muscular hero type. Fridge (Hart) turns into a fretful zoologist. Bethany (Black) crosses the gender and body-image divide as an overweight male explorer. Martha, in a bit of meta humour, turns into a scantily attired action girl like “real” video game heroine Lara Croft.
They’re not given much to go on when they drop into Jumanji’s jungle realm.
That’s OK, because there’s not much story, either.
They’ll soon learn that they have just three lives to live (tattooed arm stripes keep track of them) and they have to put a baseball-sized glowing green rock into the eye of a jaguar-shaped mountain if they want to return home. A villain played by Bobby Cannavale will try to stop them. We know he’s bad because one eye is cloudy and scorpions come out of his mouth. Cue much CGI animal mayhem, as per the original Jumanji, but also a few decent laughs as this crew of misfits learns the value of “being who you are” and working together as a team.
No extra points are awarded for guessing the outcome.
But I think there should be some kind of prize for anyone who figures out why the classic head-banging title song by Guns N’ Roses is banished to the closing credits, while Big Mountain’s reggae version of Peter Frampton’s insipid ballad “Baby, I Love Your Way” is integrated into the main action.