Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle Is Expert, Clean Fun

Looking for a lively, wholesome movie to run across with the family unit this holiday season? The obvious option is The Greatest Showman, the musical that demonstrates how circus impresario P.T. Barnum (Hugh Jackman) didn't exploit "freaks" by charging people coin to point at them and jeer — he actually gave them a sense of cocky-worth! My colleague Emily Yoshida dissects the "incredibly specious empowerment metaphor holding up this rinky-dink tent" with painful accuracy — and should get combat pay for attempting to transcribe the numbskull lyrics. Motility on to the next screen at the multiplex (plug your ears if you're passing The Greatest Showman) and run across Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. The movie has amusingly broad performances; good, anemic scares (the characters dice horribly — only have multiple lives); and self-empowering life lessons too banal to be specious. You could practise far worse.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a sequel to and not a remake of the agreeable 1995 Jumanji (starring Robin Williams and the young Kirsten Dunst) based on Chris Van Allsburg'southward wonderful 1981 book. In the 1995 film, players of the mysterious board game Jumanji institute their reality invaded by sundry animal, man, and insect predators. In the 21st-century version, 4 very different kinds of teenagers in detention — yes, it's a Breakfast Club redux — become whisked into a jungle cyberworld where they find themselves inhabiting wildly inapposite avatars.

The upshot is that Dwayne Johnson (playing a nerd who finds himself in Dwayne Johnson's body) gazes on his own humongous biceps with the same kind of amazement that the residuum of usa do, while Karen Gillan (the repository of the brainy misfit girl) looks down at her impossibly long legs equally if thinking, "How do I walk on these things?" Jack Black (inhabited by a blonde high-school girl) simpers in horror at his own squat reflection, while the atomic pop-top Kevin Hart — the avatar of a black kid congenital like a linebacker — screams, "Where's the rest of me?"

The plot is by the numbers, but that'south okay since the characters are inside a game in which the plot is by the numbers. They need to work together to survive various lethal obstacles (rhinos, hippos, wildcats, Bobby Cannavale) and restore a precious gem to its rightful place atop a mountain. If they don't, they'll exist stuck in the game forever. The proof is in the form of Nick Jonas as the avatar of a guy who has been at that place since 1996, when someone manifestly found the Jumanji board game that was tossed away in Jumanji.

If director Jake Kasdan volition never be dislocated for an activeness stylist, he'll never be taken for a stumblebum, either. He hits his marks. And who cares if the CGI looks bogus? It's an artificial world. Actually, I wish that Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle had looked fifty-fifty more artificial — that Kasdan had pushed the boundaries. Why stick with the jungle when in that location could have been multiple settings — Camelot, the One-time Westward, outer space? Peradventure those will be the sequels. Can the filmmakers come up with new ways to showcase Johnson's pecs?

It's fun to watch Johnson use the sight of his ain trunk to teach himself not to run screaming from peril and get up the nervus to kiss Gillan, who has to learn to smolder like a femme fatale, every bit well as come to terms with her sudden talent for martial arts. (Gillan is a superb physical comedian — it'southward as if she'south standing outside herself watching her own body kick ass.) All the characters have to learn that they "only go one life," fifty-fifty though they actually become three, which comes off as a mixed message. The Greatest Showman lyricists would take tried to make a song out of that:

Yous only become one life/

Or maybe three/

And so go and ride your lite/

Into a tree/

'Cause y'all'll come dorsum once more/

And get eaten past a rhinoceros/

La-la-la albino …

Jumanji Is Adept, Clean, Slightly Bland Fun