‘I’ve seen things you’ve only seen in your nightmares…’
Jumanji is a weird one. It was never a big film for me growing up and it wasn’t critically successful either. There is a fairly strong argument that Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a superior film, but the original still seems to remain part of the kids’ classics canon. Revisiting it again for the first time in 20 years or so revealed both the film’s charms and its flaws…
Jumanji follows two basic timelines. in 1969, Alan Parrish, the child (Adam Hann-Byrd) of a wealthy shoemaker, is sucked into a boardgame seemingly never to return while his horrified friend Sarah (Laura Bell Bundy) helplessly watches on. Twenty-six years later, brother and sister Judy (Kirsten Dunst) and Peter (Bradley Pierce) play the same game we see in the prologue and inadvertently retrieve Alan (now played by Robin Williams) and are forced to finish the game (Oh… the game is called Jumanji by the way) in order to get everything back to normal. While that seems like a lot of plot for a kid’s film, it’s actually very simple.
This simplicity is the main issue here. Whilst I don’t sit down to a kid’s film and expect Glengarry Glen Ross, there isn’t enough plot here to fill out a feature film. This is all concept and set pieces. Director Joe Johnston used this same technique on Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and while the creativity of the practical effects makes up for the lack of character development in that movie, Jumanji feels underdeveloped. It also doesn’t help that this isn’t really Williams’ best work either. The beloved comic actor is always at his best when he can demonstrate his pathos, his innate sadness (channelled perfectly in Mrs. Doubtfire, for example), but Alan Parrish is just kind of a bummer. He brings down the vibe. Indeed, Bonnie Hunt, who plays grown-up Laura, does a much better job of capturing the zany tone required to make the outlandish premise work.
Despite the superficiality of the plot, some of the practical effects here are better than most of the CGI gloop splurged out by Hollywood today, and this, combined with misplaced nostalgia, will probably always ensure that Jumanji’s stellar reputation remains intact – a solid but perhaps overrated movie.