Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle Review

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a 2017 action-adventure film by Jake Kasdan, who doesn't exactly have an...impressive career, shall we say. He directed Sex Tape, Bad Teacher and other not-great films. And, given that, I was pretty surprised by the quality of this film.

I think that is partly because of its extremely talented main cast - The Rock, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan and Jack Black, who is probably best here. They all play the avatars of younger kids, who, unfortunately, are pretty much just archetypes. There's the smart one, the attractive popular one, the unattractive unpopular girl, and the jock. However, this film does far more with those archetypes than you would think.

Clearly, this film is targeted at people seventeen and younger (but there is a lot aimed at adults in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle), and it's about things which are very relevant to people that age - first love, discovering who you are and who you want to be, and the film is consistently funny and entertaining. It's 2 hours long, and pretty much every moment of that is merited.

That is by far the best thing about the film. It's nothing new or inventive, but it's just so damn entertaining. The fight scenes are fantastic, and you can tell the entire main cast is having a lot of fun doing this. I was also having a lot of fun watching it. I can't tell if I only like this so much because I wasn't really expecting anything, but it's well worth a lot, and it's one of the few remakes I can think of that was actually worth the time and effort.

It's not just a remake - this time, Jumanji is a video game, not a board game, and without spoiling any of the jokes, the film satirises and plays with the concept of them a lot. If you were a fan of the original Jumanji (or Zathura), then you'll love this. They captured exactly what made the original so great, and updated it for a day surprisingly well.

Score: B+