They've Got Fun And Games

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Jumanji is an average film that people remember as being better than it was because nostalgia is a drug and we all love Robin Williams. That original movie involved playing a magical board-game in which animals spawned out of it and caused mass devastation on the real world. Although I'd argue that it still wasn't quite as destructive as the average game of Monopoly can be. We once played a game in which - I swear to God - one friend attempted to avoid going bankrupt by offering fucking blow-jobs around. Considering the popularity of the original film, it's odd that it's taken over twenty years for a sequel to come out and I have no idea why that might have been? Maybe Robin Williams was reluctant to return? Or maybe there was a sequel in 2005 called Zathura: A Space Adventure and everybody forgot it instantly? I guess we'll never know. To keep things fresh, this sequel decides to do things a little differently to the original. Rather than being about a board-game releasing a load of animals into our world, it's about a video-game that sucks people into its world. Just to write that again so you can take it in without shitting your pants.. this is a sequel that dares to do something new. Thank God it wasn't a Star Wars movie or people would be pressing rape charges against it for ruining their childhood about now.

Four teenagers are given detention for various reasons. The main character is basically a nerd that looks like Barton Fink with a mole on his lip that's so distracting it deserves its own Hollywood agent. When he gets sucked into the game he finds himself inside the body of The Rock, which must be fun because, let's face it.. who hasn't ever dreamed about being inside the body of The Rock? Joining him is a nerdy girl that turns into Karen Gillan and a hot girl that turns into Jack Black. Oh, and there's the main guy's friend; a teenaged jock that literally looks like he's being played by some fucking Jump Street-type undercover thirty year old whose gaming character is Kevin Hart. Imagine a cross between Tropic Thunder and David Cronenberg's Existenz and you've basically got this movie. What's great about it though is that despite being a belated sequel to a film that I wasn't even that arsed about, I actually really enjoyed it. I mean, I'm not going to spaff my pants over it.. not unless Karen Gillan does those high-kicks again anyway.

But for something that looked so mundanely average in its trailers, Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle is actually really good fun. In fact it even ranks up there as one of the best video-game movie adaptations of all time for several simple reasons. Firstly it's not actually based on a video-game at all. For some reason, most video-game movies tend to come out like a steaming pile of wank, with the exception of those like Crank, Scott Pilgrim, Run Lola Run, and this, in which they simply take the ideas of the medium but don't actually have any specific source material. One of the main reasons as to why this might be is that the original games feature characters that are so vacuous and empty that they could host Songs Of Praise or feature in hardcore pornography and nobody would think of them as being out of place. In honesty I'm never entirely sure that Mario and Ron Jeremy aren't the same person, or at the very least related. So when it comes to the film adaptation you either have to give the character a personality and risk the wrath of the original players because it didn't match their specific expectation.. or you keep them completely fucking bland and risk putting the rest of the audience into a total fucking coma.

With Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle also essentially being a body-swap movie, not only do they get the chance to do original characters but then you also get to see actors playing against type. Although all of the cast were pretty brilliant, I have to say that Jack Black was so good at playing a hot girl that by the end of the movie I was actually starting to fancy him. When the girl finds out that she now looks like him, she quickly discovers that she has a cock which leads to several jokes about how useful they are to pee with compared to what she's used to. In fact she seems so impressed with how good it is to have a cock that I'm not entirely sure that her character development didn't involve her realising that she'd spent her life as a closet transgender. Which actually kind of leads to another reason that this movie worked as well as it did. Even though all of the action and story was pretty generic, the jokes were actually pretty good. At one point you have Jack Black teaching Karen Gillan how to act like a slut which is funny for two reasons.. Firstly, Jack Black's skills as a physical comedian really come into their own here, and he's just hilarious. Secondly both characters seem oblivious to the fact that Karen Gillan is already so attractive that if she even looked at a guy then most of us would get so over-excited that our cocks would explode like a pervert's remake of Scanners.

The final reason that I think this film works as well as it does is that on top of the decent acting, good jokes, and at least passable action, it does have a message to it. As the movie goes on, the characters learn to like each other for who they are underneath and not just because they now look like The fucking Rock... although that obviously helps. They also learn that the only way that they'll complete tasks and finish the game is by working together and as a team. Again this also helps if you look like The Rock I suppose. Neither of those are particularly original or deep messages but in a world of Brexit and whatever fluff haired, Jabba-the-Hutt Pig-guard is in the White House, they seem to be awfully relevant. I have no idea if this new Jumanji will be remembered as fondly as the original with the kids of today because I don't especially understand why the last one is remembered so fondly with people my own age. I can tell you that it was certainly worth a watch though and with its bright colours and simple plot it'd be a pretty good film to watch whilst stoned... if one were to indulge in such a terrible activity of course. To be fair though, in the depressing misery of our Trump/Brexit world, a film to get fucking zonked to is also quite a favourable quality! Thanks for reading motherfuckers and see you next time.