Starring Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan, Nick Jonas and Bobby Cannavale. Written by Jake Kasdan, Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Scott Rosenberg and Jeff Pinkner. Directed by Jake Kasdan. Running time 7140 seconds of your precious, precious life. Budget $110 million.
Four American stereotype high school teenagers, a Jock, Nerd, Shy Girl and 'Selfie-Princess' get given detention for a variety of transgressions including, texting in class. Cheating on your homework, telling your gym teacher they're a waste of space and being bullied. Purely to get the plot working, they find themselves in the basement of the school where all junk is kept and told to remove staples from old magazines. Within the golden ten-minute rule of ALL blockbuster films, our cast have found an old Nintendo-style video cassette game called Jumanji and decide to ignore the punishment. Instead they each select an 'avatar' for themselves from the menu screen of the game and find themselves sucked into the game where they're transformed into four generic game types. So that our nerd is transformed into the huge muscle-bound, archeologist hero Dr. Smoulder Bravestone (Dwyane Johnson), our high 7 foot tall school football player, called the Fridge, is given the avatar of Sidekick (Kevin Hart), the selfie obsessed Princess is transformed into middle-aged, fat scientist (Jack Black), and the shy girl is converted into Lara Croft clone (Karen Gillian). From then on they're literally fighting for their very lives in the world's dullest and most generic video game ever made.
Our cast of 'stars' then trudge across Hawaii losing the occasional life (they get three each, cos this is a video game) as they attempt to replace a green gem into the eye of the tiger that sees all in the land of Jumanji, all the while slightly chased by the villain (Bobby Cannavale) and his horde of motor-bike riding goons who turn up occasionally to shoot at them or pop the odd wheelie. The nature of the video game set up means that the peril and challenge increases as our band of heroes make their way through the game, although don't worry that level never rises beyond mild jeopardy. CGI is used whenever the filmmaker can't be arsed to do anything approaching, you know, film making, so each and every special effect is an uncanny-valley CGI dirge of overly shiny effects and the animation is piss poor and ignores the laws of gravity.
To propel the paper thin plot along odd jokes or rye comments are made about old video games along the nature of, 'oh, we're in a cut scene', which seem to be there purely for the audience. Now this would work if the audience in mind were ones playing video games back in the 1990s, but most of the references bare no relationship to video games played today. The video game nature of the film hamstrings the plot completely as each of the characters progress along the pre-written path nature of the game, this is no sandbox world but a linear line which just progresses along from A to C, no time for the other letters mainly because the audience might get bored.
Aimed solidly at children, this film lacks teeth, or anything else for that matter. That is apart from two very odd sexually based sequences. The first concerns Jack Black's character who we discover is the avatar of the 'Princess' character, she's obsessed with her looks, with texting and with using her sexuality. On discovering she has a penis we are treated to a delightfully awkward scene where Black, Johnson and Hart stand around teaching Black how to piss and Black discovers his penis has handles. Later he develops an erection, but not before we are treated to an incredibly uncomfortable scene where Karen Gillan, dressed in hotpants and crop top is taught how to flirt with men and how to tease with her sexuality. This scene is made even more uncomfortable since it's Black, in ultra camp mode telling Gillan how to exploit her sexuality to advance the game.
Sure these sequences did garnish laughs, I burst out laughing at the pissing scene, but then I think I was laughing mainly out of embarrassment, as I would imagine were most of the parents in the cinema who could be heard whisper-explaining what was happening to the much younger kids.
I'm giving this film far too much credit and considered opinion. It's a film that works best as the 3 minute trailer, when all this sexual stuff is ignored for a series of CGI effects and one-liners.
As a film, it's lazy, dreary, very unfunny and utterly bland. Usually Dwayne Johnson can be called on to elevate these sort of films, like Journey to the Centre of the Earth 2, and make them worth a laugh, but not so this time, likewise Kevin Hart's small-man shtick gets thin within seconds, as does Black's camp, mincing performance. And Karen Gillan gives us nothing more than some eye candy for the dads.
Sending very mixed messages and offering us nothing approaching proper entertainment this is an ugly, bland and generic piece of shit that squanders its one and only interesting idea for a sickening smaltzy ending. That idea is that our heroes find another human player who's been lost in the game for 20 years, waiting for other players to help him get over a difficult level. But the fact that he's lost 20 years of his life, is pissed up a tree when on completing the game he doesn't return to our time, but to his own back in the past.
3/10 for Karen Gillan in hot pants and crop top.
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