Video Game adaptations are hard. The last three decades are littered with valiant attempts to make a good movie out of a video game. The best of these movies all have the "for a video game movie" disclaimer attached to them. And it makes sense. Video games are explorations. They are about putting the power in the player's hands. That's not how movies (or books or plays) work. Those things are about presenting something to an audience and seeing how they respond to it. The hope with turning a video game into a movie is that the characters are people an audience would like to follow on a new adventure even when they relinquish the control.
In that respect, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is the worst of both worlds. It's a video game adaptation of a video game that doesn't exist. It's trying to integrate a video game structure and logic into a movie script while also having to create notable characters. All in all, Welcome to the Jungle is about as good as it could be, which is better than I expected.
Instead of a board game, the idea this time is that Jumanji is a video game that four high schoolers get trapped in while in detention. Everything that happens in the movie before the teens get stuck in the game is fine to roll your eyes at. It's clunky and stupid and the screenwriters are just as ready as the audience to get through it as quickly as possible. The movie doesn't really begin until the high schoolers turn into Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, Kevin Hart, and Jack Black. The big joke is that the teens inside of all of their bodies are the opposite of those actors. The Rock is the nerd. Kevin Hart is the jock. Jack Black is a cool girl. Karen Gillan is a geeky girl. You can write all the jokes for that now without even needing to see the movie. It's still funny enough in the movie, because there are certain easy jokes that are always funny.
The quest of the game in the movie only barely makes sense. It's not like they are taking a video game and figuring out how it would work as an action movie. It's more the opposite. They take a generic action movie and figure out how each part can be made into a level in a video game. The end result isn't great. To be fair, no one involved is under the impression that this is a movie to be taken seriously. The movie makes a lot of sense when you look at the writers. Two pairs of writers are credited. One pair's filmography includes a bunch of typical if not generic action movies and TV shows. The other is a pair of former Community writers. So, the first pair comes up with a genetic adventure movie and the second pair deconstructs it and finds meta-jokes to make about it. That's the movie.
There's not much point in me saying much more about it than that. It's enjoyable enough. It would make a lot more sense as a PG movie rather than PG-13. It's not too long. It's not overly-proud of itself for for not taking itself seriously. Best of all, it isn't transparently positioning itself for a sequel.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
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