Review: Jumanji

 

Siblings Kirsten Dunst and Bradley Pierce move into a new house with their rather cold mother (Bebe Neuwirth, natch), and find an old board game they’ve never heard of called “Jumanji”. They decide to play it, and each turn they take seems to unleash a new stampeding wild animal causing havoc. Also turning up out of nowhere is a shaggy Robin Williams, as a man who has been trapped inside the game ever since he was a little boy. Bonnie Hunt and David Alan Grier play figures from Williams’ past.

 

We all loved and miss Robin Williams terribly, I’m sure. He gave us lots of laughs, and unforgettable films and characters. Let’s face it though, he also gave us some of the worst or at least most disappointing films as well. “Toys”, “Jack”, “Hook”, “What Dreams May Come”, and this 1995 magical board game movie from director Joe Johnston, all struck me as films that could’ve, and should’ve worked…but to some degree or another, didn’t. I haven’t watched “What Dreams May Come” since my first viewing in the late 90s, but I can certainly attest that the other films still remain every bit as disappointing if not more, including “Jumanji”. This really should’ve worked. Robin Williams + board game come to life, sounds like the perfect marriage. But so did Robin Williams as Peter Pan in a Steven Spielberg movie, and we all know “Hook” was a bloated mess. This film is even worse, and Williams takes forever to make his official entrance in a film that still wouldn’t work too well even if he were in every frame. Joe Dante or Steven Spielberg might’ve had a chance of executing it a bit better, but Joe Johnston (“Honey, I Shrunk the Kids”, “The Rocketeer”, “The Wolfman”) certainly botches it.

 

The special FX were clearly meant to be the show here, they’re done by the well-regarded ILM, so you’d think they’d be the highlight here. Sadly they’re incredibly uneven, and didn’t work for me back in 1995, either. Some of it is fairly decent, including CGI bats, an OK lion, and CGI vines that are probably the best of the lot. The rest though…yikes. The animal stampede that everyone seems to remember is every bit as ‘meh’ as I found it as a teenager. The giant mosquitos certainly don’t pass the 1995 standard let alone 2020. The monkeys, in addition to being rip-offs of “Gremlins”, don’t remotely convince. If you’re gonna feature animals, they kinda have to convince, since they’re meant to be real animals, even if they’re computer generated. The crocodile is actually old-school animatronics work by the looks of it, which I’d normally favour over CGI, but it looks even less mobile than Bruce the Shark from “Jaws”, and that was 20 years before this film. Seriously “Starship Troopers” was only two years after this, but the gap in FX quality is staggering. CGI dates quicker, I’ve said it for so long now. The absolute worst though, are the animatronic spiders, they’re so bad that I’ve seen better FX work in an Edward D. Wood Jr. film for crying out loud. That’s how bad it is. Such a schizo FX job overall by people who really ought to have known (and produced) better. Don’t even get me started on the ‘wolf boy’ makeup, either. That’s just ghastly, awkward, and nightmare-inducing for children, I’d wager. In fact, the whole film would come across as a little too intense if it weren’t all so tedious and flat. A lot of the best kids/family films are a bit scary, but the biggest crime here is boredom.

 

Robin Williams is far and away the best thing here, and it takes a good 30 minutes or so for him to turn up. He isn’t able to save the film, but it’s not through lack of trying. Bonnie Hunt turns up even later, and she’s pretty good too. The rest of the cast? Not so much, with the children – Kirsten Dunst included – especially charmless. The weakest link here is clearly ex-pat Aussie character actor Jonathan Hyde in the dual role of the hunter and Williams’ cold-hearted father. A fourth-rate John Glover, Hyde gives a hollow, pantomime of a performance. On the plus side, the music score by the late James Horner (“Battle Beyond the Stars”, “Aliens”, “Titanic”) is pretty good.

 

“Time Bandits” crossed with the later “Small Soldiers”, but not as good as either film. Some people actually love this noisy, chaotic board game film. I wasn’t one of them at age 15 and I’m certainly not one of them at age 40. This is tedious, painfully slow-moving, and largely unconvincing. Robin Williams’ fine performance is utterly wasted in this joyless exercise in uneven special FX work. The concept had potential, the production design and music score are good, but that’s about it. I imagine the book by Chris Van Allsburg seemed like a great movie waiting to happen, but Johnston, ILM, and screenwriters Jonathan Hensleigh (“Die Hard with a Vengeance”, “Armageddon”, “Next”), Greg Taylor (“Prancer”, “Harriet the Spy”), and Jim Strain (“Bingo”) haven’t delivered on the promise. 

 

Rating: D+