LOST IN THE ‘JUNGLE’
Actors hunt for laughs in ‘Jumanji’
A1980s bodyswitching movie four times over, “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle,” which boasts four credited screenwriters, adapting a book by Chris Van Allsburg, begins like a John Hughes film (specifically “The Breakfast Club”) and then heads to the jungle, where it turns into a knockoff of “The Goonies” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
After a clumsily staged prelude, we meet four students at Brantford High School: generic nerd Spencer Gilpin (Alex Wolff), who tends to say “Oy, vey” a lot; self-absorbed, phone-obsessed, pretty girl Bethany Walker (Madison Iseman); a failing African-American student-athlete named Anthony “Fridge” Johnson (Ser'Darius Blaine); and shy gal Martha Kaply (Morgan Turner). When all of them meet in detention, they come across an old Nintendo player and a cartridge from a board game named Jumanji, and, of course, they turn it on.
Are they all visited by a little ghost girl with long black hair and killed? Not quite. But they are sucked into the game's universe, a jungle where Spencer becomes gigantic musclebound archaeologist Dr. Xander Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson); “Fridge” turns into diminutive, although funny knapsack-carrying, wisecracking zoologist Franklin “Moose” Finbar (Kevin Hart); Martha becomes tall, shorts- and leather-halterclad “commando” Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan, “Guardians of the Galaxy”); and Bethany gets genderas well as body-switched into cartographer professor Shelly Oberon (Jack Black), who does not know how his man parts work.
In the game world, they can die and come back to life, although only for a limited number of times, after which they die for good, and they are challenged by a game character named Nigel (Rhys Darby) to lift a curse and bring Jumanji back to life.
Their nemesis is the generically evil John Hardin (Bobby Cannavale), who has scorpions, spiders and centipedes — oh, my— crawling in and out of his ears and mouth and God knows where else, and leads a squad of motorcyclemounted gunmen, who look like they eat children and drink crystal meth.
Along the way, our challenged and body-switched heroes will encounter Nick Jonas, or at least a supposed pilot named Alex played by Jonas, who has been trapped in the game for a long time.
A sequel to a 1995 film I did not even like, “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” improves upon the original, but not by much. This new “Jumanji” has someone shout “Run” every 10 minutes from yet another CGI rhino stampede. Someone gets eaten by a hippo. Johnson and Black are mildly amusing acting like teenagers living inside middleaged bodies. Gillan makes the most of the cliched wallflower-becomes-hotwarrior-princess routine. Yes, that is Tim Matheson (“Animal House”) as Alex's bitter, reclusive father.
The death-defying action is a little too physicsdefying for me to be at all suspenseful. Director Jake Kasdan's previous credits include “Sex Tape” and “Bad Teacher.” Yeah, I barely remember them, too, and I expect “Jumanji” to fade away as well. The best I can say is that it was better than I expected.