Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)

Director: Jake Kasdan

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, Kevin Hart, Jack Black

Have I Seen it Before: Yes.

Did I Like It: I can’t say I was ever in a market for a sequel to the Robin Williams vehicle Jumanji (1995). I can’t even imagine anyone who was aching for a second installment. And that may be the secret to the twenty-year-plus after the fact sequel: Proceed only when expectations are non existant.

It also helps to make the film in a genre completely different from the original. Many have tried for the post-modern riff on The Breakfast Club (1985). They even tried to force the Power Rangers into that mold one time. Here, it largely works because the film is not coming from the same stable of filmmakers that make every other modern entry of hum-drum spectacle (I’m looking in your direction, Zach Snyder), but instead someone with legitimate comedy credentials in Kasdan (Orange County (2002), Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)). 

It also helps that each of the key cast members are playing against type. Black and Hart’s performances might have been one-note jokes that would have lived and died in the trailer for the movie, but they are legitimately funny screen presences, so that helps. There are few actresses who can be pointedly easy as the eyes and still believably act like they were never aware of it, but Gillan is that performer.

And then there’s The Rock, or at this point we should really call him Mr. Johnson. That he could come from the world of professional wrestling and still be an engaging and charming leading man in action movies makes him singular in his field. That he is able to evoke the nebbish and not take his macho image at all seriously puts him far above most of his action star brethren. Only Schwarzenegger has credibly brought his presence to comedy, and even he has never done so completely divorced from his image of the Austrian Oak. Somebody like Stallone has never gotten close.

It didn’t have to be a Jumanji film; it’s merely a film far more enjoyable than it had any right or expectation to be.

Walk Hard (2007)

Director: Jake Kasdan

Cast: John C. Reilly, Jenna Fischer, Tim Meadows, Kristen Wiig

Have I Seen it Before: Yep. Somehow, I once had the DVD on my shelf, but I got rid of it at some point, and I can’t quite account for it.

Did I Like It: I really did, for the most part! I liked it so much that I was mystified that the movie had so conclusively dropped off my radar in the years since its release. I even bought tracks of the soundtrack off of iTunes with some long-since abandoned, a fact that I only realized when I self consciously started singing along with some of the songs.

The film itself is in the best tradition of spoofs like Airplane (1980) and The Naked Gun (1988), which is also pretty surprising. For one thing, the Apatow pedigree would be a more realistic comedy like The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) and Knocked Up (2007). For another, By the time this film has been released, I had mostly written off the joke as machine gun spoofs, largely because the experiment that was the Scary Movie franchise got out of the lab and flooded us with unwatchable dreck.

As much as the film might entertain, especially in its opening minutes when the tragedy of Cox’s childhood (and the trappings of similar biopics) is writ large, the film does run a little bit out of gas. Call me a sucker for absurdism but redeeming Cox and grounding him back in reality saps the film of its best laughs. A little bit of that manic energy remains until the end, but you can’t quite measure up to a game of chicken with a tractor and a bull.

But that the music in the film works on its own grounds is what makes it a treat to revisit after all this time. Just as soon as the runtime ended on Netflix, I put the soundtrack back on my Apple Music list. Welcome back, Dewey. It’s been a while.

Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)

Director: Jake Kasdan

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Missed it in the theater. May be missing a lot of movies in the theater for a while. Sigh. 

Let’s not get into that right now.

Did I Like It: There is nothing wrong with this second (third?) movie in this series. It’s reasonably funny. It is adequately filled with the kind of adventure-film tropes one would expect from the series. The stars are all people I would have no trouble watching in really any movie in which they might appear. 

To that note, Warner Bros. would be insane to not let Karen Gillan play Barbara Gordon/Batgirl (Oracle?) in a movie, and let her direct it, but Warner Bros. has been pretty thoroughly insane in their missed opportunities with that character so far. 

Dwayne Johnson continues to make his wrestling career an afterthought for his career, playing equal measures weirdo and pulp hero. He could have been an unbelievably awesome Doc Strange, were it to come to pass, but it seems like we’re going to get stuck with some merely competent former wrestler/actor like John Cena or Donald Trump*.

Let’s not get into any of those things right now.

But all of this was present in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017). The film explores some new territory with its characters, bringing in the energy of Danny DeVito, Danny Glover, and Awkwafina into the mix. Ultimately all of these new additions and how they play into the film came fully delivered with the film’s first trailer. Upon watching that trailer, I thought this new film would be as fresh and exciting as the original (second?) film.

As it turns out, it’s more of the same. Not a complete condemnation, but not a delivery on the promise it once showed.

*Yes, absolutely, that was low hanging fruit. Did it make me smile to type it? Also, absolutely.