Review of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) by Kevin F — 30 Dec 2017

A ductile Sunday follow-up that shatters the pledges raised from its wheedling envelope.

Art is the quality, activity or product executed from the fruit of skills, keeping a core artistic and communicative purpose, an own idea that is materialized through different resources predisposed by humans that ends up influencing what people think and feel, a way of expressing, a way of manifesting. Over the years, the evolution of man has stirred up the emersion of disparate disciplines, always focused on the aesthetic conception overlaid by the time, which were established as Arts, they were officially enumerated by Ricciotto Cuckold in 1911; dance, music and poetry form a reserved list of expressions whose basis is the exhibition of personal thought in response to the events of the world, each of these intervened, of course, by the perceptions and styles of the artist, thus placing originality, imagination and creativity as cardinal tools. Within this prodigious series of acts is the one which, personally, I consider the mother of all arts: cinema, clearly. The Seventh Art, as many call it, is capable of encompassing any of the traditional arts disseminated by human senses, it manages to join movements, narrations, colors and melodies by means of picture and sound. Precisely, an audio-(sound, hearing) visual (vision) experience represents the perfect mold, one in which each individual takes the role of emitter and receiver. From its birth on 28 December 1895 from the hand of the Lumière brothers to my latest showing on 28 December 2018 have passed 123 years of stories, biographies, tales, loves and disappointments, betrayals and loyalties, surprises and speeches; cinematic annals raised by masterpieces, debuts, sequels, trilogies or octologies from different men and women who show intimate insights on millions of screens around the world weekly, creating a range of universes that have written, officially, the highly controversial History of Film. At this point, today, it's revealed the difficulty of each release hitting cinemas to add something fruitfully n brand-new to the Book of Celluloid. More than half of them culminate in either average or deeply deceptive flicks, being only a small minority which gets to take a place, at least, in golden headlines from the best of the year, here, the actor germ: the lack of originality. This problem, sharply commented by this reviewer, affected and continues to affect the creative minds of Hollywood, the cinematic power that being on the brink of the abyss, opts to reuse, literally, proposals from the past, using new faces to get a new audience who shows interest in seeing more of the same, then, Will we get to the point where cinema establishes a unique series of stories on which the thousands of filmmakers work? We pray for no more recycling of ideas.

Within the culture broth that has become American cinema, lies adaptation, remake, reboot and continuation; "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle" drinks from these four disadvantaged categories. A hybrid that becomes an adaptation of the mythical reference book, a remake of the legacy and mythology of 90's story, a reboot of the time and customs in which the tale develops, a sequel when posing a contemporary plot with a fascinating twist, and even reaches to play with homage in certain fragments that venerate the motion picture from twenty-two years ago. With sufficient controversy and critic, more non-exemplary ideas are cooking up, desperately, with major studios as sponsors, while, quietly and gradually, small indie productions are dedicated to being such small minority.

Jake Kasdan directs the flick that means the kick off for a possible needless saga of stories that, according to the grossing at the box office - which are predicted favorable -, will have the chance of arriving in the years to come. Basically, the mythology is preserved, a mythical board game in which every roll of the dice means a drastic change in the real world of the players, however, the variable in the declared sequel reverses the rules, it's founded on the transporting of the players inside the game - now video game cassettes - personified by the sexiest, most hilarious and requested movie stars of today. So far, everything looks interesting and potentially functional, however, this game is missing pieces. The script starts to waver hardly in the introduction of the new batch of actors, some high school boys who fit perfectly in the stereotyped juvenile roles, only, to pour them in the cloned characters of modern cinema. Although the film takes its time presenting the four young protagonists, the spectator never gets good vibes with any of them due to a lousy and clichéd sketch of characters, their attitudes fall into the abhorrent common places and end up in those same places. It's worth highlighting the high level of predictability that the script shows, it's possible to anticipate each move that story is going to execute, besides, adding a poor chemistry and charm between the quartet of the young characters. In the first act, there is a framing in which the four are seated side by side awaiting their punishment, however, there is an empty chair, opening the opportunity to foreshadow the sudden appearance of the character that would become the comic relief, but not, It's just an empty chair until the half the footage, at least, a pinch of subversion. Likewise, we shouldn't expect any kind of identification with the plastic avatars in the jungle-themed game, equally pigeonholed in the roles of strength, intelligence, beauty and stupidity; nor with an antagonist who allows different disgusting insects come out from inside his ears or mouth. Yeah man, the film knows how to build up ephemeral situations in which the vis comica of each one of them pops up, nevertheless, it never touches the same emotional, comical and even sinister dimensions of the feature film directed by Joe Johnston, where we watched a newcomer Kirsten Dunst along with the acting master Robin Williams. It's indisputable that thanks to the busiest and most popular cast, led by the always hilarious Jack Black, the story remains standing and manages to stretch a dynamic and kinetic pace as much as possible, however, it does by an odious predictability and some visual landscapes that don't exploit the huge possibilities that they held in their hands, even though most of the locations are real places (Hawaii) and its special medium-level digital effects. As is customary in these types of proposals, the film is as chaotic as the situations it exhibits due to traditional symptoms, that are hidden behind all the creative process. The first and main trigger is the number of screenwriters, four writers proposing and laughing at an executive table while they prepare a cocktail of dramatic and sidesplitting moments as unequally functional as necessarily witty. Chris McKenna, the man behind "Spider-Man: Homecoming" and "The LEGO Batman Movie" - two of the superhero jewels of the year - was responsible for writing the global story, but apparently, it seems to have left all his powerful ideas in his previous works. Leaning ingeniously and respectfully on the world of video games, the central plot follows a traditional structure and doesn't provide eminent strangeness that should be the salvation key for this kind of movies, those that set up its stories more in the humor of the situations than in the humor of tale as such. As a strong point, a cunning, subtle play around the video-game-themed background, the screenwriters gave with an ingenious magical formula to overturn the storylines or the different settings of newfangled video game consoles with, of course, a narrative and parody purpose, however, many of these situations work well, even though the film is riddled with them.

Jake Kasdan's "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle" brings together three of the funniest movie stars of the moment, one "Doctor Who" Scottish actress and one former member of the American pop-rock band Jonas Brothers to deliver a free-entertainment film with the exact doses of nostalgia and new content, devoid of any drop of true originality, but brimming with one-liners and comical moments that follows the proper procedures of the typical mega-studio productions in the genre. A funny follow-up to close a year of surprising cinema of just quality, therefore, simply stays in that way, in a correct and admissible time killer, not something really substantial. One more play in the lucrative game called Hollywood. A game, just that.