Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle

The next Karen Gillan film to look at is Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle. Now, there is a lot of flack at movie executives for reviving old properties, usually with no success (see the latest Charlie's Angels film) but for some reason, this 2017 film took a twenty-year-old film, Jumanji, and rebooted it to tremendous success.

Jumanji was about a very interactive board game, in which a boy gets sucked into it and comes out an adult (Robin Williams), and the world of the game enters the real world. In this reboot, of course the game is now a video game, and we go into the world of the game.

"Who plays board games?" a character says early on. It's 1996, and the board game, washed ashore from the last film, magically transforms into a video cartridge. That player is sucked into the game and never heard from again. Twenty years later, a Breakfast Club-style grouping of high school kids are in detention and discover the discarded game (how it ended up at the school is unexplained). The four kids start it up and find themselves in the world of Jumanji, an African jungle with numerous dangers.

What's clever about the film is that the four kids end up in avatars unlike themselves. The nerdy kid ends up looking like Dwayne Johnson. The big football star is in the diminutive form of Kevin Hart. Gillan plays a timid teenage girl, while in the most inspired casting, Jack Black hosts a teenage princess.

This makes for some fun acting exercises, but I felt the premise wasn't executed as it might have been. The action sequences are routine, and that the characters all learn something about themselves is cliche. The acting is fun, though--watching Johnson play a nervous Nellie and especially Black (a scene in which he teaches Gillan how to flirt is a highlight) is very good but it doesn't make up for the mediocrity of the script.

A sequel is coming out in a few weeks. I'll catch it on home video, if only for Gillan.