Spencer’s feeling bummed out, having recently split from Martha on hand to offer him some crotchety counsel is his grandfather, Eddie, played by Danny DeVito, who starts applying the comic electrodes in his very first scene. They are Spencer (Alex Wolff), Fridge (Ser’Darius Blain), Bethany (Madison Iseman) and Martha (Morgan Turner), four teens headed home for the holidays after months away at college. The setup piles a lot of stuff you don’t care about onto a bunch of characters you may not remember. It’s not bad for an hour’s entertainment too bad it runs for two. It reunites the original cast and adds some welcome new faces, a couple of fresh conceptual wrinkles, two hair-raising action scenes and some unearned lump-in-the-throat sentimentality. “Jumanji: The Next Level,” directed by Kasdan from a script he wrote with Jeff Pinkner and Scott Rosenberg, is an amiable retread passing itself off as an upgrade. I wish I could muster more enthusiasm, and so, I imagine, did the filmmakers. It was a body-swap comedy at heart, a movie of gratifyingly analog pleasures beneath the obligatory CGI razzle-dazzle.Īnd speaking of obligatory: I promised at the time I wouldn’t overlook the sequel, and so, well, here we are. Said game then proceeded to suck four teenagers into its virtual safari-themed world, recasting them as fantasy avatars played, in nimbly elastic comic performances, by Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black and Karen Gillan. But at the very least, a missed opportunity to weigh in on a surprisingly effective year-end diversion, a studio-engineered cash cow that’s a pretty good time before it more or less evaporates from memory.Īs directed by Jake Kasdan, “Welcome to the Jungle” took the mysterious board game introduced in Chris Van Allsburg’s splendid picture book (the basis for the not-so-splendid 1995 Robin Williams movie) and upgraded it into a Nintendo-style console entertainment. Catching up with the movie several weeks and several hundred million dollars in box office later, I realized that my decision had been - well, not a mistake, exactly. Two years ago, amid the glut of a busy holiday movie season, I opted not to review “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.” You won’t read a less interesting opening sentence in this newspaper, I know, but bear with me.
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