Plot- When Spencer goes back into the fantastical world of Jumanji, pals Martha, Fridge and Bethany re-enter the game to bring him home. But the game is now broken -- and fighting back. Everything the friends know about Jumanji is about to change, as they soon discover there's more obstacles and more danger to overcome.
I have one rule when it comes to sequels and that is that I just don't want it to be exactly the same as the original. If the film at least takes some risk and does something fresh then I'm always going to enjoy it more then I would a simple reprint of the first film. Well, it becomes clear pretty quick that Jumanji 2 was definitely going to break that rule and to no real surprise, it did exactly that. The biggest problem with Jumanji 2 is that it just shouldn't exist and if it should it definitely shouldn't be the film we got. The movie is basically a copy and paste of the original but it's actually even worse because the few changes they did make not only sucked but it made the film very cluttered and they didn't do a great job with developing characters or giving them each a satisfying amount of screen time.
Unlike the first film which was actually better then I expected to be and was something I enjoyed, this movie just isn't really funny at all. With very few genuinely enjoyable movies a film like this that is supposed to rely on comedy falls flat on its face when it clearly runs out of comedic ideas after the first 10 minutes. The action is alright but nothing really special, nothing really changes in the characters and the story is worn out so the lack of comedy makes the film so much more boring and a lot harder to like at all. They spent so much time hanging off of cliches and bad writing that this movie was just falling apart especially from a comedic aspect.
The cast of this film also didn't help this movies case. The Rock and Kevin Hart went from both individually delivering some of the best acting and comedic performances in film of their career with incredible charisma to delivering weak performance were most moment the two shared on-screen felt forced and quite cringe. Nothing really changed for the rest of the mediocre cast besides the insanely unlikeable overuse of stupid jokes about Jack Black's appearance and weight. Everyone was just kind of there and did the same thing they did the last film so they added nothing of interesting value.
There are still some good things about Jumanji 2 though like the visuals are as expected quite fantastic! The scenery is beautiful and the island at least looks like a mysterious place you'd want to explore. I also like how they added new skillsets to the video game characters to shake it up but something they added to the game aspect of the film that I didn't like was the weird body of water that could be used to let players switch characters. It made everything that happened beforehand pretty much pointless and was just a really shitty way of solving their issues. On top of that, it leads us to a really corny and predictable ending to the old people storyline that was already super unnecessary.
Jumanji 2 may have some good moments but it tries so hard to be like the first film while missing everything that made the first film so fun to watch that it completely falls on its face within the first ten minutes. Most of the jokes miss, the overall performances from the cast never really reach over that mediocre mark and due to all the characters, they try to work on screen this very simplistic film manages to feel bloated at times and having you feel overwhelmed in a sense. This film is essentially the definition of a safe studio sequel, guaranteed money and something most people won't think about or even care enough about to realize how bad it really is. This honestly sucks because the first one was actually enjoyable and was a success but this film showed me that in the hands of these writers and creators that don't care about this films they are making that somehow a film like Jumanji has no real franchise potential because no effort will be put into the future films. It's like the next Transformers of the franchise world, no one will care about it when they finally start making the right changes which is just sad to think about all the potential the first film gave us has no just been ruined. Personally, I wouldn't recommend this movie but I am sure some people would enjoy this for what it was.
Rating: 3.2/10
Comments