Home Cinema Retro Review - Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (12)

It's a lot easier to be brave when you've got lives to spare.

This time two years ago I was so absorbed with The Last Jedi as the big holiday family movie that I bypassed another little filmic entertainment - one that went on to gross nearly a billion dollars at the worldwide box-office. With its sequel now on general release, here at last is my Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle review:

The Gist: Four disparate teens in detention - so far, so Breakfast Club - discover a video version of the game Jumanji. That's the same one Robin Williams and a group of kids played back in 1995, only twenty-four years ago they were all dealing with a magical boardgame. This time around the players in question find themselves not only sucked into the game, but transformed into the avatars they so innocently choose. Thus nerdy hypochondriac Spencer - for example - becomes the unfeasibly muscular Dr Smolder Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson), while his gym-enhanced fellow-student 'Fridge' is reduced to the Kevin Hart-sized zoologist Franklin 'Mouse' Finbar. Together these unlikely adventurers must find their way through Jumanji's various levels, fulfilling an epic quest before they run out of video-game lives, and developing a sense of camaraderie along the way. (See? The Breakfast Club with ravenous rhinos.)

The Juice: It actually worked in Jumanji 2017's favour that no one really cared about a sequel to the Williams movie. Expectations were so low that this revamp exploded into cinemas as a refreshing surprise. Chief among its plus-points is the comic use of a video-game avatar conceit. Johnson and Hart make great comic capital out of their role-reversals, Karen Gillen embraces both the irritation and the exuberance of a sardonic alt-teen dropped into the body and costume of a Lara Croft-esque bad-ass and Jack Black steals one scene after another as the high-school it-girl turned into - well - Jack Black. The bickering foursome with all their excitement, outrage and jokey banter form the story's centre, so that the special effects serve to enhance rather than to overwhelm. The script has inventive fun throughout with gaming tropes and succeesd in raising the stakes when it matters. It all zips along so that you don't even feel the two-hour runtime, nor have room to ask why the villains have independent lives in a video game. (Well they wouldn't, would they???)

The Judgement: 7/10. I'd been told for two years the Jumanji reboot was a good time and it didn't let me down. One or two dubiously adult (but nonetheless amusing) jokes aside, this is an exhilerating family adventure, which spins the Jumanji format into something fresh, funny and entertaining. Never more so than every time Jack Black speaks. An unexpected treat - or it would have been, had I not been so late to the virtual jungle party.