Jumanji Welcome to the Jungle. Image courtesy of Columbia Pictures.
When Jumanji Welcome to the Jungle was released in 2017 I was pleasantly surprised to find the film quite enjoyable. Usually when studios start re-hashing old IP, nothing good can ever come of it. But Welcome to the Jungle had a simple but effective premise: what if four stock high school characters (the nerd, the awkward girl, the valley girl and the jock) got transported to a video game universe where they were put in wildly different bodies that played against their character type? And what if those video game bodies were played by Hollywood super-stars like The Rock, Kevin Hart and Jack Black?
Well, the answer is that you have a surprisingly fun and funny movie on your hands that does interesting things with its characters - suddenly the nerd with no confidence is the strongest, bravest man in the world. The premise was also developed well, with genuinely clever writing. When Kevin Hart’s character is killed by eating cake, for instance, it got a well-earned laugh. And the ways the implications of being in a video game world are played for laughs and, sometimes, for emotion show evidence of thoughtful writing and story structure.
Jumanji Welcome to the Jungle was a big hit, thanks in no small part to the care that went into making it. And what happens when you have a big hit on your hands? You need to make a sequel that does everything the first one did, but bigger and louder and dumber. And that’s where Jumanji The Next Level gets tripped up. It doesn’t offer anything new on the prior film’s formula. The only innovation it makes, if one can call it that, it to introduce two elderly characters, played by Danny DeVito and Danny Glover, into the mix and give them a noxious back-story involving a long-time feud over a restaurant.
This is bitingly unoriginal, but it also creates a situation where The Rock spends much of the movie - far, far too much - doing a Danny DeVito impression. This probably came about because Kevin Hart wanted to do a Danny Glover impression (which he pulls off pretty well), but I cannot fathom why no one stopped this from going further with respect to The Rock.
It can still, at some points, coast on the sheer charm and charisma of its stars. But so much of Jumanji The Next Level is just a re-warming of the greatest hits from the first film, including numerous references to cake which fall flatter than a poorly made souffle. it ends up dragging on too long, and the way that certain characters in the first film overcame their limitations (by inhabiting the bodies of video game avatars very different from themselves) doesn’t really land in the sequel because everyone is in the wrong bodies.
In short it is too long, it doesn’t offer anything new other than The Rock doing a truly terrible accent, and it abandons the care that went into making the first one surprisingly not terrible. In other words, it is a typical money-grab sequel, and while there are a few redemptive moments I guess it was too much to expect lightning to strike twice.
