Jumanji Welcome to the Jungle Full Movie Online
Four high school students have been given detention together. They are Spencer, the nerdy gamer, Fridge, the football jock, Martha, the academics-obsessed bookworm and Bethany, the social media-obsessed popular girl. Jumanji Welcome to the Jungle They are given the task of removing staples from mounds of magazines set to be recycled. In the process of not really working too hard on their work, they find an old video game console with a single cartridge: Jumanji.
But this is a movie about a bunch of teenagers stuck inside
a video game, and Welcome to the Jungle attempts to spin that into a series of
humorous shots at gaming conventions. The problem is that the movie has an
awfully conventional idea of what game conventions are. The characters discover
they each have three lives, which are displayed as small bars tattooed on their
forearms. Smacking their chests reveals their strengths and weaknesses, Jumanji Welcome to the
Jungle 2017
rendered in 8-bit text. One odd sequence setting up the movie’s villain (Bobby
Cannavale, hamming it up as much as possible) is used as an opportunity for
Spencer to explain what a cut-scene is, as if that’s some hyper-obscure piece
of geek knowledge.
It’s almost as if the creators of the film
think gaming is permanently stuck in the mid-‘90s, which turns the references
into a series of out-of-touch dad jokes.Have you ever been sitting around with
your friends, talking about movie ideas you'd like to see? During these
conversations, did anybody say they wanted to see a mash-up of The Breakfast
Club and Tron? Yeah, I've never heard anyone say that, either. Somebody wanted
to see it, though, and they decided the best way would be to make the
sequel/reboot Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.The foursome end up getting sucked
into the world of the game.
They look like the avatars they chose to use
in the game, all the exact opposite of who they are in the real world. Spencer
is now Dr. Smolder Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson). Fridge is now Franklin Finbar
(Kevin Hart). Martha is Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan). Bethany is now
Professor Sheldon Oberon (Jack Black). They now must use the particular skills
of their avatars to work together and make their way through the levels of the
game, without losing all three lives each has been allotted, in order to get
back home.
There’s also the issue of Gillan’s character. In the real
world, Martha is a smart teenager who gets in trouble for frankly speaking her
mind. Inside the game, however, she comes across as utterly awkward, without
the intelligence or agency she demonstrated outside it. Her arc is built around
learning to accept that she’s attractive, which plays out literally, Jumanji
Welcome to the Jungle Movie as Jack Black’s Bethany teaches her how to flirt and act
seductive to distract some bodyguards.
At first, it’s amusing to watch Gillan
play the scenes as physical comedy. And then it sinks in that this is a
teenaged girl who’s being taught that her great untapped potential is whipping
her hair around to turn men on. The movie does course-correct slightly — Martha
ultimately becomes a formidable action foe — but even then, she’s good at
“dance fighting,” which is as weird and out-of-left-field as it sounds.
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a coming-of-age story, and other characters
also learn to be comfortable with different aspects of themselves. But a 2017
film adopting the iconography of a character as historically problematic as
Lara Croft should offer more than the surface-level shrug of LOL, that’s just
how games were back then!
Welcome
to the Jungle is a diversionary piece of entertainment, so eager to please that
it’s able to get in and out without leaving either a positive or negative
impression. It has eom appeal for fans of The Rock, and audiences who grew up
on the original film and ‘90s gaming. But it’s hard to imagine this succeeding
as a franchise relaunch, given that it’s already struggling to find relevant
things to say about its subject. Culturally, we may be slowly transitioning
from ‘80s nostalgia to the ‘90s, but despite its strong points, nothing in
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle feels as if it’s seizing a cultural moment, or
making a strong case for itself.
Perhaps it can serve as a sort of time
capsule. Like the actual Jumanji game, the film may just hang around for 20
years, Jumanji
Welcome to the Jungle Free at which point audiences
can revisit it, take in what it does right, look at what it does wrong, and
wonder why we were so obsessed with the past in the first place.Welcome to the
Jungle’s first big gag is how the four misfits appear in the game. Each chooses
a different gaming avatar before they’re sucked inside, which leads to some
amusing fish-out-of-water hijinks right from the start. The nerdy Spencer has
become the excessively charming Johnson. Football star Fridge is now an
ineffectual Kevin Hart, whose main abilities are carrying a large backpack and
commenting on how short he is. Martha has become a butt-kicking Lara Croft
rip-off, played by Karen Gillan, and Bethany is a cartographer played by Jack
Black. It’s fodder for plenty of easy jokes — director Jake Kasdan and the four
credited writers never seem to tire of having Black’s Bethany marvel at her new
genitalia — and while they’re mostly obvious gags, they do give Johnson many
opportunities to show off his charisma, with Spencer boasting about it. The
film is at its very best when it embraces this meta aspect of Johnson’s
onscreen persona, and it’s actually impossible to imagine any other modern
actor pulling off the role. Then, when Johnson downshifts into revealing just
how authentically insecure Spencer is, he’s able to pull off some real
vulnerability as well.
Despite being a movie no one was really clamoring to see, Jumanji
Welcome to the Jungle Online Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a surprising delight. It's a
fast-paced and fun adventure that works off the charisma of its actors and the
entertainment gained from watching them play both against type and exactly who
we expect them to play.
Johnson
and Hart sort of step back into the characters they played in Central
Intelligence, but with minor differences here and there. Gillan is charmingly
awkward when being Martha, especially in a moment that has to be the dorkiest
kiss ever put on film, but allows her Nebula character from the Guardians
movies to kick in when she needs to go full-on Ruby against the bad guys. Of
course, it's Black who utterly shines while playing a teenage girl in a grown
man's body.
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