It may not be the best production of its nature but ‘Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle’ is quite entertaining and watchable. Four teenagers who have served detention find themselves taking on avatars entirely different to themselves and being sucked into a video game titled ‘Jumanji’.
Enter Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart and Karen Gillan. They are later accompanied by Nick Jonas as Alex. More shock awaits them as they discover that they not only have to play the game but they need to survive it as well. Each player is given three lives and they need to work as a team and embark on the most dangerous adventure of their lives. The only way out of the game is to get a magical jewel of the jungle and return it back to the eye socket of a statue.
What is truly delightful about the movie is that it spends only a few minutes to bring forth the characteristics of the teenagers before us before diving into action. Tons of belly laughs await us when we discover that the teens have taken on personalities which might have been in their nightmares as they are completely their opposites.
For example nerdy Alex becomes Dwayne Johnson’s Dr Smolder Bravestone, imposing US football player Fridge winds up in teeny-tiny form as Kevin Hart; wallflower Martha becomes hotpants-wearing sexy Ruby Roundhouse and It Girl Bethany winds up as a tubby middle aged professor named Shelly Oberon. Watching them spar verbally and sometimes physically with each other, while playing the game will leave you in tears.
Quite a few films which use humans as pawns in games have entered the Hollywood scene of late. ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ had wizard chess, with the pieces coming alive while the renowned ‘Hunger Games’ trilogy deals with the brutal game of using the less privileged as victims of entertainment for those wealthy citizens in the Capitol. David Fincher’s ‘The Game’ and Danny Boyle’s ‘The Beach’ too include scenes which visualize a game. In this light ‘Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle’ is not a new concept but what is refreshing is the way it is presented.
‘Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle’ is screening at Liberty by Scope Cinemas.
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