My initial reservation with Jumanji: Welcome was it being a reboot. It turned out to be something equally worrisome, a sequel. In its defense, the team behind Welcome did an excellent job in updating the premise and execution; the board game transforms into a cartridge (circa the mid Nineties) to lure its next contestant, a teenage boy. It leads to the boy’s disappearance and the story becomes a local myth.
Fast forward to the present (roughly 2016-18). Here we meet a modern version of the Breakfast Club, minus the John Bender character, all sentenced to detention over various offenses. Their punishment after school is to clean out the AV closet of obsolete technology. One stumbles upon a Nintendo 64-esque system, convinces the others to play and voila…they re-appear in the word of Jumanji as the avatars they chose at the game’s start. Much like the original, they must finish the game to escape. Along the way, the quartet learns a valuable lesson or two.
I was surprised how much I liked this. I still feel that Kevin Hart and Dwayne Johnson are overexposed, trust me, the latter has many more flicks appearing this year. Beyond the cast, I applaud how the writers kept the video-game tropes, namely how certain people they would encounter (NPCs) would repeat the same thing since there were limits to technology.
Somara and I caught this at the discount theater. It wasn’t worth the money and trouble of an Alamo screening. Now it’s out on Blu-Ray so I can safely say, should Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle show up on your streaming service of choice, it won’t be a waste of 90 minutes.