Jumanji Welcome to the Jungle (2017)

Jumanji's got it's problems. Yes it is a poor-man's Breakfast Club meets low-rent Indiana Jones. The threadbare plot with its greeting card moral rings as false as one would imagine. And the characters (not the "avatars" but the actual characters each set of actors are playing) are the height of cliche. But for some reason the less than necessary Jumanji reboot pulls off a rather entertaining, if completely superficial, adventure.

I give most of this responsibility to the cast, Jack Black and Kevin Hart as the stand outs. They bring a level of charm and wit to an otherwise dismal script and make it hard not to smile along despite the more than obvious flaws. Black manages the most remarkable performance of the bunch (more on that later) and will have the audience in stitches, but impressively not in the way one would imagine.

The thing about Jumanji is that there were so many instances for it to get ugly. The conceit, that teenagers have been pulled into a lifelike jungle adventure game, and into the bodies of characters in that game sets up a rather cliched troupe about a girl in a man's body. See where this is going? There was such potential for the film to milk that in a truly ugly way, a way that plays on mainstream audiences level of discomfort with queer identities. Not only is she in a different gendered body, she also develops feelings for a handsome young pilot (Nick Jonas) while in the the body of middle aged man. I kept waiting for the film to fall to those depths... and it never did. Black keeps the humour very honest and never relies on homophobic or transphobic jokes to sell it. Kudos to him.

Yeah the dialogue is clunky and the story super predictable, but there is a charm to this film to that makes it a relatively enjoyable waste of time. And since it doesn't attempt to get laughs by exploiting vulnerable people, I guess there is nothing wrong with that.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan, Nick Jonas
Director: Jake Kasden
Writers: Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Scott Rosenberg, Jeff Pinkner