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.
The best film stars are defined by their voices and none had a finer voice than Ronald Colman; I would bet it has been imitated more often than any other. His good looks got him parts in silent cinema, but when the talkies came along, he really bloomed—the man with the mellifluous voice. But even with that liquid gold voice, great parts were few and far between, and even this list of his best films gets a bit weak toward the end.
An actor with both one of the most distinctive profiles and most distinctive voices in Hollywood, Basil Rathbone became identified with Sherlock Holmes to his dismay. He should have taken more joy in the connection as few of his other lead roles have been remembered. He was in a large number of classic films, but, except for 
Ginger Rogers will forever be known as the dancing partner of Fred Astaire; they fit together. Together they made some of the greatest film musicals of all time. She could manage the steps, as well as both the sophisticated and common attitudes needed for the comedy and romance. Astaire danced with others who were technically better, but no one who was such a perfect partner. Apart from Astaire she strove to have a “serious” career (after a group of “let’s put on a Broadway show” films) that led to a string of turgid melodramas that she could never pull off—not that anyone could have made Kitty Foyle watchable. Her best “solo” works were comedies.
Handsome and debonair, Milland’s early career was mainly in romantic comedies and light action films. His big break came with The Jungle Princess (1936), which made Dorothy Lamour a star as The Sarong Girl. His reputation changed with The Lost Weekend (1945) which won multiple Oscars, but is hard to view as anything other than suffering-porn now—it lacks a plot and an ending. It was no doubt important for people who never realized that alcoholism was bad. But this did alert Hollywood to his skill as a serious actor.
Basil Rathbone starred as Sherlock Holmes in 14 films, with Nigel Bruce as a blustering, foolish Doctor Watson. When I watched these as a child—broadcast one each week by a local TV station—I treated them like a TV show, with all of the movies being approximately the same. They aren’t.
Stewart had a more varied career than most actors and far more than most leading men of the golden age. He not only was in, but was known for, comedies, dramas, melodramas, family films, romances, thrillers, and Westerns. Early in his career, he was in a string of sentimental Frank Capra movies, with It’s A Wonderful Life being the most famous. I’m not a fan of these as they tend to go over the top with shmaltz, letting both real human interaction and humor die for the sake of sentimentality. The worst offender is You Can’t Take It with You, a wonderful play that is gutted by Capra. Luckily, Stewart had other moments, with strong turns in comedies before becoming one of Hitchcock’s two favorites (
Some lists are hard. Some are easy. And some are pretty much repeats. This one is a