Dec 172017
 
three reels

Four stereotypical teenagers, the nerdy weakling, the smart overly serious girl, the popular girl, and the football player, get detention in stereotypical ways and find the Jumanji video game. The game sucks them into a jungle world where they take the forms of the avatars they had chosen: the powerful guy (Dwayne Johnson), the combat girl (Karen Gillan), the scholarly guy (Jack Black), and Kevin Hart (Kevin Hart). In order to return to the real world, they must finish the game by saving the world in a way that doesn’t really matter. Along the way they meet Alex Vreeke (Nick Jonas) who entered the game twenty years ago and is their missing fifth player.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is somewhere between a sequel and a remake of the 1995 Robin Williams kid’s flick that people remember as better than it was. Really. Sit down and watch it. Not that good, but not that bad. As such, this sequel doesn’t have any real legacy to besmirch, and as it dumps the oddly self-serious tone of the first, is a mild improvement. It also has a tenuous attachment to the original and given an hour or two at the script stage, could have been made completely stand-alone. But the connection doesn’t hurt anything.

Welcome to the Jungle is a by-the-numbers action-comedy. Nothing is earnest for more than a minute and I never worried about what’s going to happen next. That’s just as well because the basic flow of the film is weak and there’s some hard-to-fathom decisions that still have me shaking my head: If everyone else in Jumanji is an NPC, why do we spend time away from our heroes with the evil guy?

The body-swapping gags get old fast (and the poorly thought-out messages about being a teen are horrible from the start), with the shocking exception of Jack Black’s gender swap. I went in with the assumption Black’s take on being an obnoxious, phone-obsessed Millennial would land as unfunny approaching offensive, but it is both humorous and sympathetic.

In fact, Black is good overall and this is where my review switches gears as he and Karen Gillan are the MVPs, always fun and engaging. The Rock is fine, as he usually is, and has plenty of jokes that land. Kevin Hart just plays Kavin Hart, so you’ll like or hate him depending on how you’ve felt about him in…everything else he’s ever been in. But Black and Gillian are worth your matinée bucks. I can’t tell if it is good dialog or just the actors elevating the material, but either way, there are a lot of laughs here. A scene in which Black teaches Gillian how to flirt could so easily have been mocking and mean-spirited, but it sidesteps that and works, as does the follow-up “dance fight.” Gillan, after her time on Doctor Who and in the Guardians of the Galaxy series, is proving herself to be the next kick-ass superstar.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle isn’t deep or thoughtful and I doubt it will be remembered in twenty years, but it’s a good-time, lightweight family film.

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