JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE
Director: Jake Kasdan
imdb
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JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE
Director: Jake Kasdan
imdb
So I was originally planning on just skipping this, when I had it suddenly come recommended to me by a number of people. So I figured what the hell and gave it a shot, and surprisingly enough, it actually lived up to the praise. Highly entertaining stuff here!
A friend and I were burning through some gift cards so we ended up seeing this. And... I agree, this was a lot better than it had any right being.
It definitely stinks of a spec script about kids being sucked into a videogame getting sold and converted into a Jumanji reboot/sequel thing. It being a Jumanji thing is the weirdest thing about it. As a videogame movie with a lot of self-aware gaming humor (character stats, NPCs, the concept of "game over" and etc.), I thought it was a lot of fun. Good production values for the most part, too. The overuse of CGI is pretty whack, obviously, but a lot of the location shooting and the practical work (e.g. The Rock delivering a good old fashioned beat down on faceless enemies) delivers, and some of the CGI even works well enough in a cartoon/videogame way. The cast works together pretty well. It's fun and charming. It gets predictably dopey when it reaches hard for some kind of message or relevancy (we always only have one life, hahaha) but I suppose that's the nature of a kid's movie. Thor: Ragnarok scratched the big budget action/comedy itch for me in 2017 but this was a nice little surprise as well.
This was generic and forgettable. They had good performers, a great location, nice production values---and exactly zero new ideas.
I didn't think this was very good (I enjoyed the first one more) but upon reflection, I was surprised how many times I laughed. Some of the Jack Black lines and the Rock smoldering were the highlights, which again is surprising since Kevin Hart is entirely forgettable. With this, and Jurassic World, the key to making a billion dollars without making a super hero movie is making your movie as generic as possible.