Juman­ji: Wel­come to the Jungle

Every time a block­buster reboot is announced, some bright spark inevitably pipes up with an adage long-since proven to be true: ​‘Hol­ly­wood is offi­cial­ly out of ideas!’ So far no one has been able to pin­point the exact moment when Hol­ly­wood did, in fact, scrape the very bot­tom of the bar­rel, but it prob­a­bly occurred some­time in the mid-2000s (per­haps when they decid­ed to remake Plan­et of the Apes). Maybe we’re all just over­come by the relent­less feel­ing of nos­tal­gia for sim­pler times. Maybe we just miss Robin Williams. Either way, Juman­ji: Wel­come to the Jun­gle is the lat­est chip­per cash­grab to be crapped out by Tinseltown.

It’s almost 22 years since the orig­i­nal Juman­ji was released – a fact that Juman­ji: Wel­come to the Jun­gle is eager to remind us of. Take note: kids don’t play board games any­more. They play video games. And take self­ies. And say­ing things like, ​“I lit­er­al­ly can­not even”. As such, Juman­ji isn’t a cursed board game that explodes into the real world to cause chaos for Kirsten Dun­st. Juman­ji is now a video game which sucks its teenage play­ers (The Geek, The Jock, The Hot Girl and The Unpop­u­lar Girl) into a vir­tu­al jun­gle, where they’re trans­formed respec­tive­ly into The Sen­si­tive Tough Guy (Dwayne John­ston), The Angry Fun­ny Man (Kevin Hart), The Fat Guy (Jack Black) and The Hot Girl (Karen Gillan). It’s The Break­fast Club, only with hip and hap­pen­ing pop cul­ture ref­er­ences thrown in to ensure the film’s com­plete irrel­e­vance in the very close future.

Which is not to say that Juman­ji: Wel­come to the Jun­gle is entire­ly beyond redemp­tion. Dwayne John­son and Kevin Hart are always a plea­sure togeth­er, and Jack Black is clear­ly hav­ing a blast chan­nelling his inner teenage girl. Karen Gillan is hand­ed the thank­less task of per­form­ing fight scenes in a crop top and tiny shorts, but she makes the most of what lit­tle she has to work with. Smart cast­ing saves the film from being a total dis­as­ter, and there are a few glim­mers of wit in the script. As mind­less enter­tain­ment goes, it’s sur­pris­ing­ly effective.

In order to get out of the video game, our plucky band of heroes must defeat Goth Indi­ana Jones (played by Bob­by Can­navale, appar­ent­ly act­ing in an entire­ly dif­fer­ent movie). But of course, what real­ly mat­ters are the things they learn about them­selves – and each oth­er – along the way. Will The Geek pluck up the courage to ask out The Hot Girl of his dreams? Will The Unpop­u­lar Girl realise she was attrac­tive on the inside all along? Yes on both accounts. It’s a paint-by-num­bers tween extrav­a­gan­za hit­ting cin­e­mas just in time for the Christ­mas hol­i­days. Although it paints itself as a nos­tal­gic riff on gam­ing his­to­ry, it feels hol­low and pre­dictable, and the thrills are cheap.

There’s very lit­tle to take away from the plot beyond the boor­ish ped­alling of inane gen­der stereo­types and the very spe­cif­ic notion of ​‘What Kids Like’ as defined by mid­dle-aged Hol­ly­wood screen­writ­ers. Cliché upon cliché stam­pedes across the screen, and all the flashy action sequences and big-name cast­ing in the world can’t save Juman­ji from what it real­ly is: a for­mu­la­ic stu­dio cash-in with noth­ing new or inter­est­ing to say.