Remakes are hard enough to sell on their own. People love movies. They grow up with them, watch and then rewatch them, and ultimately pass them on to the next generation as a precious corner of their lives. But when you remake a movie that was already wildly popular the first time around — featuring one of the iconic roles of a beloved entertainer whose increasingly distant passing feels heartbreakingly recent the moment its brought up in any context — you have an especially tall mountain of public malaise to overcome.
Knowing this, studio executives at Columbia Pictures tried to split the difference: easing public antipathy toward yet anther corporate cash-grab cynically greenlit to cash in on a beloved childhood classic for an entire generation of aging movie goers. No, this is a sequel to the first Jumanji. It’s not the same story about outcast Allan Parish getting sucked into a board game only to come home decades later. This doesn’t star two middle schoolers accidentally unleash the fury of the jungle on their unsuspecting, white bread town. This isn’t the same at all.
When four teenagers from different social circles wind up in detention together — cleaning out the school’s decrept basement, they discover an old, Atari era video game called, you guessed it, Jumanji. Wanting nothing more than to escape their unenviable punishment for a couple of hours, they plug it in and each choose a character that they think matches their personalities best: the badass, the scientist, the curvaceous eye-candy and the tough-as-nails fighter.
Problem is, however, that this is no ordinary game, and their choices were all inherently the wrong ones. “Badass” Moose Finbar is actually whiny little pack mule Kevin Hart. “Curvy Genius” Shelly Oberon is actually Jack Black (who, admittedly, is pretty darn curvy). Contrary to what his academic degree might suggest, Dr. Smolder Bravestone is actually The Rock. Ruby Roundhouse is actually played by sci-fi fan favorite Karen Gillan in a cut-off shirt, some carefully positioned leather straps and booty shorts.
The rules of the game are the same as they’ve ever been. Players must make their way to the center of the jungle, brimming with exotic dangers, in order to end the game.
It’s obvious what Sony was thinking with this movie and, honestly, I have to commend them for thinking outside of the box. The movie is a reversal on traditional teenage character archetypes. The jock and the nerd switch places, as do the preppy cheerleader and the introverted loser. The smart guy has to run point into enemy territory while the meathead has a bag full of gadgets he needs to figure out. The sexy valley girl who’s “too pretty” to serve detention with everybody else is now a shlubby middle-aged guy while the mousy dork is Laura Croft.
Not only that, but it’s an immediate inversion of the plot of the first movie. Instead of bringing the jungle into suburbia, it pulls suburbanites into the jungle. This is basically what would have happened if the first Jumanji followed Allan Parish after he woke up in the jungle instead of flash-forwarding to two decades later.
The problem is that Sony’s idea might have been too clever by half. In their madcap rush to change their so-called sequel to avoid negative comparisons to the movie they’re remaking, they threw out, updated or reversed everything that the first movie was about. Except for the name, there’s nothing at all to connect this new film with the one it’s supposed to follow, begging the question of why they bothered to tie it to the original at all.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: the trailer makes the movie look bad. Really bad. Brendan Frasier’s Journey to the Center of the Earth bad. Spy Kids bad.
The movie looks like it has more in common with a body swapping fantasy like Freaky Friday than a Robin Williams comedy. A video game is a poor substitute for the ages-past feel of a hand carved board game from an era where calling Africa “the Black Continent” was still a socially acceptable thing to do. This just feels like somebody’s Turock fan fiction.
I could obviously still be wrong about this. In fact, I hope I am. The premise, though a bit overworked, is still a clever one. The cast is uniformly excellent and have proven more than capable of handling similar material in the past. I’m also getting a pretty strong Goosebumps vibe from the whole production, and that movie turned out to be shockingly great in its own right, so who can tell at this point?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VT6Z4YyNRLo%22+frameborder%3D%220%22+allow%3D%22accelerometer%3B+encrypted-media%3B+gyroscope%3B+picture-in-picture%22+allowfullscreen%3E%3C
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