Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)

IMDB Rating : 7.1/10 ( as on 23.12.2017)

PG-13 | 1h 59min | Action, Adventure, Comedy

Four teenagers discover an old video game console and are literally drawn into the game's jungle setting, becoming the adult avatars they choose.

Director: Jake Kasdan

Writers: Chris McKenna (screenplay by), Erik Sommers (screenplay by) | 4 more credits »

Stars: Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, Kevin Har

 IMDB link Here

Movie rating ★★★☆☆   

Dwayne Johnson's winning video game adventure isn't much of a challenge

Robbie Collin,

Films based on video games have been dependably awful since Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo pulled on their overalls for the Super Mario Bros movie in 1993. But films that draw inspiration from games – that riff on their visual grammar and toy with their odd formal conventions – are often much more fun: try Dan Trachtenberg’s 10 Cloverfield Lane and Jung Byung-gil’s The Villainess for starters.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle falls somewhere between the two groups, insofar as it’s based on a video game that doesn’t exist. This older-skewing children’s adventure is a long-range sequel to the 1995 family film Jumanji, in which an African menagerie, plus Robin Williams, came stampeding out of a magical, jungle-themed board game.

But that was then. “Who plays board games?” grimaces a teenager in the film’s winking prologue – a comment which prompts the enchanted box to shape-shift into a video game cartridge, which is later unearthed by four teens on detention in the present. Clutching one controller apiece, they’re sucked into the game’s treacherous tropical world, where escape to the real world lies at the end of a five-level quest.

As ideas for franchise rejuvenations go, this is an unusually slick one, and is made all the peppier by the teens’ continuing struggle to acclimatise to their new in-game avatars’ forms. In the fine old body-swap comedy style, they’ve all picked against type. Geeky Spencer is the musclebound heartthrob (Dwayne Johnson), while strapping football jock Fridge fins himself demoted to pint-sized sidekick (Kevin Hart).

The video game aspect is less cunningly sussed out: all five “levels” of Jumanji look indistinguishable, while the characters’ mission, returning gemstone A to clifftop shrine B, rarely involves them doing anything all that game-like.

Easy laughs are all it aims for, such as having background characters, like Rhys Darby’s jeep-revving guide, repeat the same chunks of dialogue ad tedium, or giving each hero three lives each, which brings significantly higher stakes to the slapstick. (Within minutes of appearing on screen, Jack Black is devoured by a hippo, then comes back.) Then there’s Gillan’s ongoing dismay at her impractical skintight outfit – a slice of dubiously postmodern cake teenage boys in the audience get to have and eat.

Director Jake Kasdan pushed silliness and send-ups to such divine heights in his 2007 satirical biopic Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story that it’s hard not to feel a sharper version of Jumanji remains somewhere out there for the taking. (Perhaps now that board games are back in fashion, a hipster reboot awaits.)

But in its present form – hyperactive, dopey, and hammered into shape like a Hollywood sitcom – it’s a passable school holiday jaunt.

Read complete review at Telegraph

Movie rating ★★★☆☆ 

 Fantasy romp likably upgraded for gamer generation

Peter Bradshaw

he 90s family adventure Jumanji was a fantasy romp about children being whooshed into the universe of a magical board game, where a former kid player played by Robin Williams had grown to adulthood, having been marooned there. The film seemed to be using the grammar and rhetoric of video-gaming, which is about getting from one level to another by not getting killed.

Now it has been upgraded for 2017 in a way that makes the gaming idea explicit, and yet also as quaint and antique as board games might have looked in 1995. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a big, brash, amiable entertainment with something of Indiana Jones, plus the body-swap comedy of Freaky Friday, or FAnstey’s Victorian classic Vice Versa. It features an endearing performance from Dwayne Johnson who, as a teen wimp magicked into a giant Herculean body, has to look nervy and nerdy and say things like “Oi vey”.

As before, there is a slightly cursory introductory sequence, but now it is set in the 90s. A weird-looking board game is discovered on a beach – it contains a game cartridge, a kid tries playing and he is spirited within. Flash forward to the present day, and four high-school teens – Instagram princess Bethany (Madison Iseman), earnest student Spence (Alex Wolff), alienated indie kid Martha (Morgan Turner) and humongous football star Fridge (Ser’Darius Blain) – are in trouble at school for various reasons. As a punishment they are made to clear out an old store room that contains this strange video-game Jumanji.

It’s a likable film which borrows liberally from everything and everyone, and if it’s put together by numbers, well, then it is done capably enough. There are some nice lines: I liked Ruby airily claiming that microbiology is one of her favourite biologies. Perhaps it is destined to be seen on small screens for sleepovers, but it’s an amiable effort that will go down like eggnog over Christmas.

 Read complete review at The Guardian

Movie rating ★★★★☆ 

Not just a lazy Hollywood remake — it’s serious family fun

Jamie East

Fun, funny, exciting . . .  it is pretty much a flawless family movie.

Clearly no one is going to watch a film about a board game in 2017, given that the only one people play nowadays is Cards Against Humanity. So we quickly see the mysterious box from ye olde times (1989) morphing into a console game, picked up by an unsuspecting fella who gets sucked into the jungle.

Fast forward to the present day and we are in a modern version of the Breakfast Club with four teens thrown together against their will in detention.

Here lies the greatness in this reboot/remake. The Jumanji they enter is no longer limited by throws of a dice, but by all the tropes and rules we see in Call Of Duty, GTA and the like.

Each kid gets the worst possible avatar. For instance, the Insta-babe becomes Jack Black. It gives the adult actors a great excuse to ham it up to perfection.

To escape the jungle they must return a jewel to its rightful place. But there are obstacles to overcome first — not least getting used to their new bodies and identities.

Despite the film playing it by the rules and borrowing from a load of sources (Goonies, Breakfast Club, Freaky Friday, Big) full credit must go to the cast who never allow us to get bored.

The body-swap gags are the pulse of the film, yet never feel tired.

Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle has several nods to 80s cult classics from Goonies to Breakfast Club

And the sentiment of being who you want to be rather than what people expect is nicely done.

Nitpickers may wonder if the baddie was bad enough or if the brief reference to Karen Gillan’s skimpy outfit sufficed.

But the belly laughs from the cinema told me how little those things mattered.

The cast were terrific and the plot riveting. If your family have had enough of Jedis but fancy some action, it is a perfect way to spend a few Christmas hours.

Read complete review at  the sun

At Least Has Dwayne Johnson Going for It

STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

Have fond memories of the 1995 Jumanji, starring Robin Williams and a very young Kirsten Dunst, about a bunch of kids who get stuck in the world of a board game? Worried that Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, directed by Jake Kasdan and starring Dwayne Johnson as a scrawny kid who magically finds himself inhabiting a not-so-scrawny adult’s body, will zap the remnants of every molecule of childhood joy you ever felt? Don’t worry too much. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle has a pleasant, affable spirit, and Johnson is wholly charming. When is he not? But the picture doesn’t leave much of a lasting aura. If your childhood memories can’t survive it, that could be a sign it’s well past time to fully commit to adulthood.

This reimagined Jumanji opens in 1996: Teenager Alex (Nick Jonas) becomes the owner of an old board game his father locates while jogging on the beach. It doesn’t interest him, of course—board games were so 1995!—but overnight the thing takes the form of a video-game cartridge. Intrigued, Alex pops it into his console, and then vanishes.

Twenty years later, a new group of kids find the old console and decide to have a whack at the antiquity lodged inside it. Before you know it, they find themselves stranded in a mysterious jungle, having assumed the avatars they’d chosen for themselves as they commenced playing the game: Shy, skinny Spencer (Alex Wolff) is now a strapping explorer (Johnson); a confident jock nicknamed Fridge (Ser’Darius Blain) becomes a short, goofy zoologist (Kevin Hart); smart-girl Martha (Morgan Turner) transforms into a hot babe heroine in short shorts (Karen Gillan); and teen troublemaker Bethany (Madison Iseman) switches genders to become a somewhat portly cryptographer (Jack Black).

Stuff happens, ostensibly involving adventure and danger, though none of the perils of this island seem all that troublesome: Each character is granted three lives, and after the last one is used up, it’ll be sayonara in real life too. But you know that’s not going to happen. The mission undertaken by these kids in adult bodies involves finding a jaguar statue that holds a gem with magical powers, and along the way Johnson’s Spencer acts dippy and awkward, even though his physical stature suggests he should be anything but. And Bethany’s Black explores the wonders of peeing like a man for the first time. None of these antics are particularly clever, but they’re not off-putting, either.

By the time Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle resolves itself, you’ll be glad you’re not a kid—provided, of course, you’re not—and you’ll be even gladder you’re not an avatar. And almost immediately, you’ll have forgotten everything you just saw. That’s the true magic of Jumanji.

 Read complete review at  Tme

Movie rating ★★☆☆☆

Kevin Maher

Dwayne Johnson, by all accounts, is a lovely man. His choice in movies, however, is terrible. We’ve barely recovered from his summer flop Baywatch and now we’re faced with Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, yet another needless reboot searching for a reason to exist.

It’s smarter, perhaps inevitably, than Baywatch, and features a jungle-based videogame into which Johnson and his co-stars Kevin Hart, Jack Black and Karen Gillan are parachuted (they play grown-up onscreen avatars of offscreen teenagers). The plot is non-existent, there are two great jokes (both, coincidentally, about male genitals) and an abysmal performance from the former teen pop sensation Nick Jonas of the Jonas brothers.

It’s a better videogame adaptation, nonetheless, than 2005’s execrable Doom. Johnson was in that too. He can really pick ’em. 

 Read complete review at The times

Movie rating ★★★★☆ 

A hoot of a reboot

Jane Horwitz

Twenty-two years later — and many leaps forward in video game and movie technology — comes a sequel to “Jumanji.”

“Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle,” a souped-up follow-up to the 1995 film starring Robin Williams, also shares as its source the surreal 1981 picture book by writer and illustrator Chris Van Allsburg, about siblings who open a board game that brings jungle animals careering through their house.

The new film, directed by Jake Kasdan, is a genuine hoot and doesn’t take itself too seriously. It is smarter and more humorous than the first movie, and its digital effects — which include stampeding albino rhinos and mountain-scraping aerobatics — are far snazzier, as one would expect. It also delivers a message, geared to teens, about overcoming their insecurities to participate fully in life, without pounding the lesson into the ground.

The film’s stars — Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart and Karen Gillan — are darn near impossible to dislike, in roles that require them to play teenagers trapped in adult bodies. Some explanation is necessary.

Spencer is now Dr. Smolder Bravestone (Johnson), a muscle-bound adventurer (though inside he’s still a worried kid). The handsome Fridge learns he is now Franklin “Moose” Finbar (Hart), a diminutive zoologist who whines a lot. Martha is now martial arts dynamo Ruby Roundhouse (Gillan).

Best of all, the self-absorbed Bethany has turned into Dr. Shelly Oberon, a paleontologist and cartographer played by Jack Black. That’s right. Shelly is short for Sheldon. In the film’s choicest moments, Black adopts subtle quirks of intonation and body language to channel a high school glamour girl who’s creeped out over having, as she puts it, “an overweight middle-aged man,” as her avatar. Black earns even more laughs when his character offers a seminar on flirting to the socially awkward Martha (a.k.a. Ruby) so she can distract a couple of bad guys while her cohorts execute a plan. The flirting tips also come in handy because she pines for the equally shy Spencer (a.k.a. Bravestone). Watching the imposing Johnson try to behave like an awkward teen has its rewards, too, though he’s not as inspired a comic actor as Black.

In the universe of the game, there is also a villain: greedy explorer Van Pelt (Bobby Cannavale), who has stolen a jewel from a sacred jaguar sculpture, bringing a curse upon the world of the game. To survive all its levels and exit Jumanji, the four avatars — with the help of a stranded pilot (Nick Jonas) — must dodge Van Pelt’s goons and return the jewel.

But it’s the characters, not the convoluted plot or digital magic, that make “Welcome to the Jungle” such fun. For a high-concept Hollywood special-effects movie, that’s quite a concept indeed.

 Read complete review at Washington Post