As Xmas approaches, four archetypal teenagers - the jock, the nerd, the princess and the Daria - get stuck in detention after school. Their job: to remove paperclips from thousands of old documents in the school storage room. Hardly a recipe for excitement, but then they stumble across an old console system with a game called "Jumanji". They decide to take a break from the humdrum busy work they've been saddled with ... and find themselves literally transformed into their characters inside the game. Naturally, said game is filled with all the usual dangers you'd expect - rampaging beasts, evil mercenaries, and so forth.
Now the quartet must learn how to leverage the abilities of their characters - and how to work together - in order to escape the game. If they fail ... well, none of them are really keen to find out what would happen then.
So obviously this is a sequel to the 1996 Robin Williams film. Which I have never seen. Fortunately, knowledge of the original film is completely unnecessary, as Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is very much a standalone narrative.
Even more fortunately, this film is a whole lot of fun. It's got a great cast and a fast-moving script that's liberally studded with both comedy and action sequences. The tension between the characteristics of the in-game characters and the 'real life' people playing them is used to good effect throughout: even the potentially problematic angle of Jack Black playing a teenage woman suddenly stuck in a man's body is handled well.
I doubt you'll regret giving Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle a couple of hours of your time.
No comments:
Post a Comment