Jumanji

Scott Hardie: “It was ok.”

This is fun, but not as good as its reputation, which I gather is inflated by childhood nostalgia. I was too old to see it at the time and I'm only getting back around to it now, although I did enjoy Chris Van Allsburg's book in grade school, and the premise lends itself quite well to a film adaptation, so I had high hopes.

The low-resolution CGI has aged about as well as the references to "darkest Africa," and the portrayal of a down-on-its-luck New Hampshire small town looks laughably borrowed from 1980s movies about the skid row of New York City. But the most frustrating problem with this movie about people forced to play a dangerous board game is how they keep doing anything except playing the damn game. One thing after another interferes with their ability to play, and they spend most of the movie chasing the box around town or repeating the same interactions with earlier game elements or bickering with each other. I gather that if they had merely played their turns and reacted once to each new development, the movie would be over in thirty minutes, so the rest can't help but feel like padding. As a long-time board game enthusiast, I've spent countless hours of my life waiting patiently for distracted people to play their turns, so it amuses me that this is also my primary reaction to a movie about a game.

But there's quite a bit of fun here too, from the mischievous monkeys to Robin Williams's toned-down-for-a-kids-film manic energy. The adult actors look like they're having even more fun than the kids. I know that the slow destruction of cars was a lazy screenwriting cliché of the era, but it's still funny watching David Alan Grier's car gradually become as frayed as his sanity. There are some good one-liners, too, and a refreshingly anarchic energy, such as the moment when one character unexpectedly breaks the fourth wall.

Two questions occurred to me to ponder:

1) Why was "be brave" the moral of the story? The things that come out of the game are scary. Robin Williams was right to fear the hunter, who was literally trying to murder him! (I know the hunter was supposed to be a metaphor for Williams's father, but the son was afraid of bullies, not of his father. He had no trouble standing up to his father in their argument.) If I recall correctly, "read the damn directions" was the moral of Van Allsburg's book, but "be careful what you wish for" would make a fine lesson too, since the core story is about kids who wish for adventure or escape and get more than wanted.

2) Roger Ebert was one of several critics who criticized the movie for being too scary for kids. The CGI looks pitiful after three decades, but back then, it seemed much more lifelike. I wonder how much this contributed to the intensity of the film. If the same movie had been made with hand-drawn animated characters coming to life because of the game, like Mary Poppins or Who Framed Roger Rabbit, would it have been less scary? It's interesting to imagine this movie being produced by Walt Disney Studios back in the 1960s instead.