Review of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) by Voodoo123 — 01 Apr 2018

The 1995 original focused on the animals from the board game coming through into reality, this 2017 'sequel' instead focuses on the human characters being absorbed into videogame version of the same magical board game. The film uses irreverent empty humour and pedestrian videogame tropes to tell its story through an entertaining yet shallow group of characters.

The two sets of casts fail to accurately imitate each others behaviour (mainly due to the uninspired character writing). Had a couple of chuckles watching it but overall this felt like it really borrows the name to sell a few tickets. If the film-makers were brave enough to break free from the jumanji trappings and expand the complexity of its characters and the 'videogame universe' to be less 2 dimensional, this could have been special, problem is you never really feel the tension of the situation these 'teenagers' find themselves in. If this were an original film concept, its entertaining enough to mark as a 6/10 but as it uses the name and does nothing to best the 1995 original it gets a 4.

Overall I consider this to be yet another shameless studio cash-grab.