Jumanji: Welcome to the jungle - Green Critic

Reopening the Jumanji box more than 20 years after the cult 1996 film with Robin Williams is undoubtedly a good case of false good idea. Did the public at the time want to see its nostalgia updated and its memories modernized? Does the 2017 generation know enough about the movie to want a sequel? Seeing the board game turned into a video game, and Dwayne Johnson in the lead, is not it proof that the machine runs too much after the modern viewer? Lack of luck, Jumanji: Welcome to the jungle fails at all levels.

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JUMANJI V2
Jumanji: Welcome to the jungle begins with the rediscovery of the board game. He finds himself in the room of a teenager of the 90s, who abandons him in favor of his console. Since he's playing off the board game ("Who's still playing this?") , Jumanji reacts: in a snap and out of the box, he turns into a video game.

This metamorphosis, set with a handy magic trick, is as much for the heroes as for the spectators. It's not just the game Jumanji that adapts to its new victims: it is the producers who, from their offices, are looking for ways to interest a new audience that prefers Uncharted to the Mysteries of Beijing The idea of ​modernizing Jumanji on this side is both expected and simple, but the real problem of Jake Kasdan's film ( Sex Tape, Bad Teacher ) is not there: the sequel to Joe Johnston's classic is a dumb thing and bland, without an ounce of imagination, which is content to walk in the nails of some kind of show without flavor.
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RESET AND GAME
First big problem: Jumanji: Welcome to the jungle is very proud to explore the video game angle of the adventure, the idea is not exploited. Aside from the idea of ​​avatars projecting an Instagram addicted into Jack Black's fat body , a scene where heroes discover their abilities, the running gag of non-playable characters or the very limited use of lives, the film is about an embarrassing laziness. At no time does the adventure give the impression of being built or thought of as a game, with levels, tests, bosses, and a meta reading yet announced and indispensable. Everything was in place to have fun with the costumes, the decor, the invisible walls, the pixels, and the overall logic of a game, but the film prefers to leave all that aside.

The one who was hoping for a funny tribute to the video game will have the strange feeling of being faced with something shaped by people who have visibly touched a controller by accident a few decades ago, and have no real notion of the thing. In the staging, in the artistic direction, in the writing: no humor, no mind and even less passionate and tender look on the video game. Replacing the board game with an old console cartridge is nothing more than a cynical string, meant to secure the attention of a new audience.

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THE BIDE OF THE JUNGLE

The modest mission of Jumanji: Welcome to the jungle is certainly to be funny. The failure is there as spectacular as the film is a debility and banality rancid. The principle of avatars is treated with a heaviness such that from the first scene, it is no longer funny : apart from Jack Black, the avatars have a logic too flat (the teenage hero becomes the hero Dwayne Johnson, the black will be Kevin Hart and the redhead, Karen Gillan), and the shift is worthy of a low-floor Disney (the shut up teenager will be a bombshell in mini-shorts, the puny boy will be a fearless musclor and the sportsman who puts on his physique, a weak gringalet). Needless to say, the morality of this whole adventure is spread in all directions, offering dialogues of a banality all the more distressing as the second degree is far too rare.

The performance and casting are also infuriating, since without any audacity or idea. Dwayne Johnson unpacks his comic-pectoral number from big kid to Hercules' body, Kevin Hart gesticulates and pollutes the environment with his nasal voice that he mechanically activates in every scene, and Jack Black goes around in circles. Whether he discovers his cock in a scene worthy of a bad impro or he makes sweet eyes to Nick Jonas (another fabulous casting idea), he seems to come out of a shoddy TV movie.

Only Karen Gillan has a little fun, despite the often awful writing - this powerful warrior has the skill of deadly dance, which sometimes turns her into a failed stripper when she could smash her opponents. The actress discovered in Doctor Who and The Guardians of the Galaxy is the least unpleasant of the group, largely because it benefits from its more modest status and brings a certain candor.

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GAME OVER

What strikes the most in this film, which claims its status in a row thanks to an uninteresting mention of the hero of Jumanji, is his appalling lack of imagination. The incredible world where the heroes are propelled is like a souk, a shed, motorcycles, a helicopter or some very simple animals, a setting as crazy as a season of Koh Lanta in Central America. Placing the adventure in the world of the game was dreaming of a crazy world, evoked in the animated series Jumanji, but the film of 2017 is ultimately less inventive than the original with its giant mosquitoes and nightmarish plants. A shame, since it unfolded in the real world.

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This is not to mention the ugliness of the whole, which struggles to demonstrate that there are twenty years of technology between the two films. Of disgusting green screens, CGI animals as evil villains staged action scenes mounted without real effectiveness: it Jumanji 's awful. Ugly, very dirty for the eyes and not bad for a penny, the film turns out more annoying enough to follow with almost two hours on the clock. These are not the few minor trials, the sad corridor of traps or this filthy final waterfall that will draw the viewer from the abyss of Hollywood boredom.

That the antagonist is insipid, that the magic is absent and that the epilogue is almost unbearable (the final kiss: to rank among the deafening peaks of nonsense) tends to make Jumanji: Welcome to the jungle one of the worst products of the year. That the film ends abruptly with a plan that seems to abandon mythology in a bin, can only leave us the bitter conviction of having been confronted with a cynical thing, vomited by the system for all the wrong reasons.

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