Mark Reviews Movies: JUMANJI: THE NEXT LEVEL

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 12, 2019

There was a certain to cleverness to the way that Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle updated the concept of a board game that comes to life. Board games aren't wholly a thing of the past yet, but when kids hear the word "game" today, their minds immediately must jump to those of the video variety. Hence, the adventure of the original sequel to and reboot of 1995's Jumanji lived entirely within the world of a video game, and the charm of that movie was how it used the form and functions of video games for humor and as an act of critiquing some of that form and those functions.

The charm isn't entirely absent from Jumanji: The Next Level, which is as predictable a sequel to its predecessor as the 2017 movie was a clever re-imagining of its own forebear. The subtitle is best to be taken literally. This isn't some leap forward for the series. It's just the same story, the same characters (with some cosmetic changes and a couple of additions), and the same jokes. The major difference is the backdrop.

We're re-introduced to our protagonists in the real world about a year or so after their first visit into the world of the Jumanji video game. Spencer (Alex Wolf) is in college in New York City, working a job at a drug store and feeling quite alone.

He and Martha (Morgan Turner), who started dating after their digital adventure, have split, and while she, Fridge (Ser'Darius Blain), and Bethany (Madison Iseman) meet for brunch after coming home for the holidays, Spencer avoids him. He's at home with his mother (played by Marin Hinkle) and his grandfather Eddie (Danny DeVito), who is staying with his family while he recovers from hip surgery.

When the three friends come to check on Spencer, he isn't in the house. They hear the drums of the game and realize that Spencer has returned to the world of Jumanji on his own. They decide to rescue him, but the game, which the group destroyed and Spencer re-assembled, now has a few bugs to it.

Upon the heroes' re-entering the game, we're re-introduced to the avatars: the brave and muscular Dr. Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson), martial arts expert Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan), zoologist "Mouse" Finbar (Kevin Hart), and "curvy" cartographer Sheldon (Jack Black). The big switch-up in this story is that the real-world people mostly don't exist as the same avatars as they did in the previous movie.

Martha is still Ruby, but Fridge is horrified to find himself as Sheldon. Bethany wasn't even transported into the game. In her stead, Eddie and Milo (Danny Glover), who has returned after decades to set things right with his old friend, have been sucked into Jumanji. Milo occupies the avatar of Mouse, and Eddie is Bravestone.

There's a plot beyond finding and saving Spencer, of course, which involves in-game villain Jurgen the Brutal (Rory McCann) and the stealing of a magical gem that brings water to Jumanji. If they follow the plot of the game, surely the group will find Spencer.

While the first movie used the clichés and trappings of video games to its benefit (until it just used them to give us a generic adventure story), this one takes all of the predecessor's work as a given. There's no attempt to expand on the ideas or the jokes of the previous movie, but screenwriters Jake Kasdan (who also directed), Jeff Pinker, and Scott Rosenberg certainly aren't opposed to repeating them. We get the lists of the game characters strengths and weaknesses, only with a few additions (Ruby can use nunchucks, and Sheldon is weak against heat, sand, and sun, which is a problem since most of this level takes place in the desert). Those non-player characters still repeat the same few pieces of dialogue over and over again, and the characters get three lives, meaning they each get to die twice in gruesomely amusing ways, before the movie needs to add some suspense to the adventure.

Most of the humor is in seeing Johnson and Hart imitate their avatar's real-world counterparts. It is, admittedly, amusing how Milo/Mouse inserts about four pieces of trivia too many about a certain animal, when the most pressing information is that they'll attack. There's also Johnson's willingness to go broad with his DeVito impression (although another actor, who's credited but whose appearance is a pleasant surprise, shows up later to top the mimicry). On the other hand, there's Black's far-less-funny imitation of Fridge (The reasons should be obvious), as well as how his old interpretation of Bethany no longer fits the character as we see her in the real world now.

The change-ups here don't really matter, not only because the character-avatar relationships revert back by the end, but also because they're pretty superficial in the first place. All of the changes in Jumanji: The Next Level are similarly cosmetic. It's neither an upgrade nor an update—just more of the same and less of what made the movie's predecessor charmingly clever.

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