The Rock, Kevin Hart, Jack Black and the actress who plays Nebula in Guardians and Avengers…all playing high school kids trapped in adult bodies? YES. I AM IN. Full stop, wanted to see this movie since it premiered, and I was not disappointed.
THE BLURB:
Four high school kids discover an old video game console and are drawn into the game’s jungle setting, literally becoming the adult avatars they chose. What they discover is that you don’t just play Jumanji – you must survive it. To beat the game and return to the real world, they’ll have to go on the most dangerous adventure of their lives, discover what Alan Parrish left 20 years ago, and change the way they think about themselves – or they’ll be stuck in the game forever.
WHAT WORKED:
The premise I described in my intro, to put it most succinctly.
The rest of this movie we’ve seen before, most notably in the first Jumanji movie, which the more and more I think about it seems like a genuine fucking classic. That movie was DARK, dramatic, tense, and wonderfully imaginative.
This movie is less so…EXCEPT…for that “Big” premise. And that’s freaking genius. Particularly with the movie stars they selected to PLAY those kids.
Jack Black takes the cake. He is absolutely scene-stealingly hilarious…and then genuine and real when the story called for it. Dwayne Johnson is wonderful, of course–the nerd he plays is a surprisingly apt fit–and so are the other two. Hart, too, especially is really, really funny.
The adventures are fun, the villain is passable in a very video-game hokey kind of way…and this idea of them being sucked into the game is even more appropriate now in this day and age with the rise of LitRPG fiction than it ever was back in the 90s.
WHAT DIDN’T:
The beginning was slow. And I don’t mean plot-wise…I mean that the PACE was off in the actual scenes. Too much air between beats. Pace is the heart of comedy, and I was really, reeaaalllyyy worried that they were going to waste this amazing cast and this virtually no-lose scenario with a complete ineptitude for comedic timing.
Thankfully, it didn’t play out that way. Once the actual action got started after the first few scenes inside the game, the comedy picked up, the pace picked up, and the overall fun and engagement picked up, too.
Beyond that…some of the YA aspects of this movie were a bit heavy-handed and sappy, EVEN for a Jumanji movie. Perhaps because we set the stage with an entire group of teenage protagonists this time? Before, the protagonist was always pre-teen. The hokey-ness worked better with actual children. The scene I’m thinking of in particular that was a roll-your-eyes moment was in the beginning, where all of the teens are getting their detention speech from the principle, and it is majorly, MAJORLY heavy-handed…with inspirational stringed scoring and everything. Yikes.
Overall, however, the movie delivers. It’s a bit more sappy than I’d expected, which is odd because the other movies DEFINITELY have the “learn-a-lesson” aspect to them…but again, I think it was odd in this movie because our heroes were OLDER, and that kind of stuff just plays better when the heroes are still kids.
The true magic, however, and a truly brilliant innovation is putting those teenagers in the bodies of adult movie stars. Truly. Brilliant. And it works.
7 out of 10 – definitely worth a watch!