GAME FOR A LAUGH?
Fantastical, exuberant and corny, Jumanji 3 is just the ticket for a family outing this Christmas — so are you ...
TWO years ago this month a couple of films came out that wildly surpassed commercial expectations.
One was The Greatest Showman, which confounded lacklustre reviews ( including mine) to become a spectacular hit. The other was Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, a funny, exuberant ‘reimagining’ of a 1995 Robin Williams film. Amazingly, its global box- office take isn’t far short of a billion dollars.
now we have the inevitable sequel, Jumanji: The next level. It’s fun, but not such unexpected fun, which was a significant part of the treat last time around. nonetheless, it does the festive equivalent of ticking all the boxes — peels all the tangerines, perhaps — for anyone planning a family outing to the cinema this Christmas.
In the 2017 film, four teenagers found themselves sucked into a video game called Jumanji, reappearing as adult characters stuck in a perilous jungle. There, in their Indiana Jones-type quest for a precious jewel, and with a fiendish baddie to outwit, they each had three lives. But the comedy sprang from the avatars they inhabited — strikingly different from their smalltown human selves.
Thus, the bookish nerd Spencer (Alex Wolff) transmogrified into man- mountain Dr Smolder Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson), while Bethany (Madison Iseman), a vain, blonde princess in thrall to her smartphone, turned into Jack Black’s tubby archaeologist Professor Sheldon Oberon.
If I had to choose my 20 favourite lines of dialogue of the decade about to close, one of them would be Oberon/ Bethany saying, in wonderment: ‘I feel like ever since I lost my phone, my other senses have kind of heightened…!’
The comedy this time isn’t quite as joyous, but otherwise director Jake Kasdan and his co-writers have stuck with pretty much the same winning formula as before.
The quartet (all played by the same actors) have reached college age, but Spencer isn’t really enjoying life at university in new york, not least because he’s broken up with his home-town girlfriend Martha (Morgan Turner). And he doesn’t look like Dr Bravestone any more.
At home for the Christmas holidays, where he is forced to share his bedroom with his cantankerous Grandpa Eddie (Danny DeVito in sparklingly grumpy form), Spencer ventures down to the basement and starts tinkering with the old video- game console again.
Soon, a crackle of electricity has propelled him back into Jumanji’s parallel universe, from which his friends decide they must rescue him.
ONLY this time, a couple of oldies accidentally join the adventure: Grandpa Eddie and his estranged friend and former business partner Milo (Danny Glover).
The challenges are much the same as in the last film — the kind of nonsense that all gamers will recognise.
Our avatar heroes must traverse inhospitable deserts populated by rampaging ostriches, cross ravines on rickety rope bridges while fighting off an army of hostile mandrills, and scale vast walls made of ice on their way to a mountain-top fortress if they are to steal a gleaming, magical jewel from around the neck of fierce warlord Jurgen the Brutal (Rory McCann from Game Of Thrones, one of the few actors bigger than ‘The Rock’ Johnson).
But this time the body swapping is even crazier, with diminutive Grandpa Eddie first materialising as enormous Dr Bravestone, and later as a new character, brilliant cat-burglar Ming Fleetfoot, played by the rapper Awkwafina.
Both she and Johnson do a fine job of channelling DeVito,
although there’s some audacious scene- stealing by Kevin Hart as zoologist ‘Mouse’ Finbar, Milo’s avatar. He does a great Danny Glover impression, and gets most of the picture’s funniest lines.
If the last film was the best body-swap comedy since Big (1988), this one doesn’t quite scale the same heights.
But there are plenty of pleasures, and the obligatory moralising — with the Jumanji experience teaching them all to be better, more contented human beings on their return to reality — is nicely handled.
THaT existential journey is a Christmas-film staple, of course — perhaps best exemplified by It’s a Wonderful Life.
But the enduring popularity of Frank Capra’s 1946 classic has regrettably nudged aside
which came out the following year. Directed by Henry Koster, it had a similar storyline and just as much charm.
If you can find it, then check out this weekend’s re-release. apart from anything else, it stars arguably the two most debonair stars from Hollywood’s golden age, and a pair of Brits to boot: Cary Grant and David Niven.
The former plays an angel called Dudley, sent to help Niven’s beleaguered bishop in his struggle to raise funds for a new cathedral.
In the process he is taught to value his marriage to lovely Julia (Loretta Young, one of the startling number of Hollywood beauties the irrepressible Niven is said to have bedded).
With the formidable Gladys Cooper and Elsa Lanchester in supporting roles, it’s a sweet, funny, captivating, altogether delightful picture, which too often gets omitted from lists of greatest- ever Christmas films.