A foursome of high school students – a hottie, a meanie, a nerd, and an athlete – are left by their principal to sort through the junk in the warehouse after school because of their behavior. Among the garbage and the used textbooks they find a console with a video game “Jumanji”, which they decide to “cut themselves into” out of nothing to do. But the game is magical, it takes the teens into the mysterious jungle, where the boys take on the guise of game characters cartographer, killer, archaeologist and zoologist, and their task is to find and return to the local temple of stolen precious stones. As is the norm in the game, the characters have abilities and weaknesses, as well as three lives, with the expiration of which it will be impossible to return to the real world.
When it is said about classic films that they do not require a sequel or remake, it is far from always a beautiful figure of speech, showing the exclusivity of the work and its value to popular culture in this pristine form. Sometimes it is literally a question of the finality of the story being told – some films come to an end, and there is no need to return to them and their characters, they are no longer capable of giving the viewer anything more. Examples of this abound, from the last in the first place come to mind a remake of the thriller “On the Crest of a Wave” and a sci-fi drama “Blade Runner 2049” – the world could do without them, the remake only sharpened the value of the original.
Joe Johnston’s 1995 family adventure film Jumanji was in no way in need of an update. Not that it was flawlessly made – its special effects look archaic today, the characters are naive, and the moral is pretty simple – but for most audiences this film was just a page-turner from years ago. Yes, it was great, yes, we were all worried about Alan Parrish disappearing into the jungle, yes, we were surprised by the invasion of monkeys and rhinos, but we grew up, and today’s kids are interested in a slightly different kind of movie. It was the latter that turned out to be a thought of unattainable depth for the makers of this new film – and they made a movie for an obscure audience, with goofy motifs and without the slightest desire to be original.
The film’s inarticulate age focus is most depressing. The original film, for all the horror and misfortune that befell the characters, was designed for a family audience, even pre-schoolers could watch it. The sequel for some reason gave a bias towards toilet humor and penis jokes, and in completely unnecessary situations, as if some slob had inserted a couple of pages of his “dirty fantasies” into the script. However, kids under 16 have no business being in the audience, but then who would watch a jungle run from hippos and elephants? Healthy foreheads drinking beer and crunching nachos?
Further, the decision of the filmmakers to move the action of the film from the real world to the fictional universe of the video game looks equally strange. In the original film, we had an extra degree of suspense – the beasts that broke out of the game almost destroyed the city. Here, however, we are not threatened by anything – that’s fine, a few schoolchildren dropped into obscurity, it happens all the time. Also, “Call of the Jungle” lost an important condition of playing the original characters – in 1995 the kids Shepard, Alan and Sarah did everything with their own hands and relied only on their own strength and ingenuity. This showed the viewer a clear message – you can cope with everything, everything is in your hands. Now the heroes not only have superpowers of dance-fighting or rock-climbing, but they also have back-up lives. And what’s that supposed to teach?
Things are so bad with morals and meanings in the new “Jumanji” that at a certain point, the characters just stop, break into pairs and begin to slowly spell out why they are here, how they feel about each other and what they need to do to change themselves for the better. And you won’t believe it – in the finale, the arrogant bimbo becomes nice, the loner learns to communicate, and the quarreling former best friends get back together. What a twist! Who would have thought! Unthinkable trick!
Well, the elephant is with them, with the meanings and characters, the movie was not made for moralizing. As it should be a game, it’s a hurricane ride, like a roller coaster. There will be helicopters and motorcycles, fights and jumps, snakes and scorpions, villains and helpers, and it is hard to imagine Jumanji without wild animals like elephants and rhinoceroses. As an entertaining spectacle the film works quite well, the more so as the actors try to do their best – Scala is extremely good when portraying a shy coward, and Jack Black, though he overacts at times, is clearly well trained to be a girl. What’s more, in the picture, viewers will encounter perhaps the best screen kiss of the year. That alone will make up for the bitterness of all the other silliness.