Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

More than 20 years after 1995’s Jumanji, the family adventure film about a couple of kids who get sucked into an ancient board game and have to play it to completion to escape, the sequel has arrived. This time, it’s all about hapless teens who get sucked into a video game and have to play it to completion to escape. Was anyone demanding a second go at Jumanji?

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is, I suspect, an attempt to recapture the unfathomable box-office success of 2012’s deeply terrible Journey 2: The Mysterious Islandmore than anything.

In this one, kids end up in the adult bodies of the in-game avatars. The teens – played by non-teen actors Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, Jack Black, Kevin Hart – are a motley batch thrown together while serving detention; they mostly don’t know and/or like each other. While cleaning out a school storeroom, they come across an ancient – from, like the ’90s, OMG – console and start playing the Indiana Jones-lite adventure, something to do with finding a sacred jewel in order to lift a curse, blah blah blah. As they traipse through the jungle solving nonsensical late-’90s videogame puzzles, this Jumanji becomes like, well, watching people play a video game – a 20-year-old fourth-rate game at that.

The idea of tossing characters into a game and forcing them to play is problematic in a few big ways. The stakes are really low, for one. They quickly learn that they can “die” in the game, but also that they instantly respawn. Sure, they also learn that, as you might expect, they get only three lives, but that’s a helluva lot more than you’d get in an adventure in the real world.

The whole shebang is little more than an excuse to have Johnson, Black, Gillan and Hart run around acting like the “hilariously” “opposite” teens occupying their avatars. The Rock, for instance, is actually the clumsy, scared and skinny nerd Spencer, and isn’t that just a riot; a mincing Black is actually the pretty and popular Bethany. The movie thinks it’s piling on additional comedy when everyone defies those stereotypes.

Jumanji is, contrary to its bright and goofy surface, a cynical undertaking in embracing the most diminishing clichés that it can apply to its characters and then asking us to cheer at half-hearted swats at them.

JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE ( * ½) • Directed by Jack Kasdan • Starring Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, Jack Black, Kevin Hart • Rated PG-13 • 119 min. • At Century Cinemas Del Monte, Century Marina, Maya Cinemas, Northridge Cinemas, Lighthouse Cinemas