Film of the Week: Jumanji – The Next Level

It was going just as well as its predecessor, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, right up to the moment when they brought in a horse as a playable character, then the film derailed. Jumanji’s abilities include spawning a stampede to crush everything in its way, an enormous vine-like creature that can tear apart a house, suck you into the game for years, update and turn itself into a video game and suck in more people where they must re-enact a video game’s storyline to escape; and Jumanji’s origin and possibly true extent of its powers may have not been fully explored yet, but having one of the main characters turn into a horse and the other characters show heartbreak towards near the end of the film when one of the characters choose to remain in the world as the horse… that seems a little silly to me, even for Jumanji.

I can overlook the water with the green electrical-like energy coursing through it being there purely so the actors can have a chance to flex their muscles, and it should be noted that everyone did a good job in capturing different personalities. The first scene where Martha and Fridge, played by Karen Gillan and Jack Black, discover they’ve swapped bodies, whilst it was amusing, I couldn’t shy away from how forced it was, and it felt as if it was only put there to set up the later scene when all the characters revert back to who they were in the last movie.

It would have been so much better if Fridge had remained as Jack Black’s character, because he could learn an important lesson that everyone has an important role to play, but instead he reverts back to Kevin Harts character and that possible plot point is gone forever. I can overlook those two points and still enjoy the film just as much as its predecessor. Note: I refuse to state the predecessor was the first film because the first film was the original Jumanji starring Robin Williams.

I just cannot skip over the fact that a horse is a playable character. It’s so out of place even for Jumanji, the same amount of emotional effect would have been achieved if they just included another person instead. And sure, they wouldn’t have been able to complete the game if it weren’t for the horse secretly having wings, but I’m sure the writers could have come up with a different way.

The idea of the game being broken and bringing in two elderly people was funny, and Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart played their parts brilliantly. It has been established there are more than the characters we got in the first film, with a new character, Ming, played by Awkwafina, and so it is possible there are even more characters which can be explored in more stories, but please don’t include any more animals as playable characters because that extinguishes any emotional attachment the scene would have had if a human was standing there instead.

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadNouns)