(This review may contain spoilers).
I thoroughly enjoyed the original Jumanji movie and while I sometimes find another movie in a franchise can be disappointing, when I saw the trailer for this movie, I was very excited about seeing this film.
I really enjoyed this movie. I felt the actors who played the original versions of the characters did a really good job of showing their personalities and I especially liked Jack Black playing a teenage girl; I thought he did a fantastic job of playing a teenage girl. Karen Gillan was good, too…but I couldn’t really connect Kevin’s portrayal with Fridge as shown at the beginning. And it was hard to imagine Dwayne Johnson as really being a teenaged boy. I just connect him too much to being the confident action hero and I felt that persona came across more.
The aspects of the computer game were quite cool and a bit more unique, with the three lives and the NPCs. There were some aspects that didn’t really get expanded upon, though, such as the game telling them to keep their health up.
It was really good to see the relationships form between the characters, especially in regards to the interactions between Bethany and Alex. It was good to see that, even though they could access the skills they had in the game, they still had the doubts and weaknesses of their true personalities.
While there was a lot of good humour in this movie, I also felt there was a good balance of serious moments along with that. And by the end of the movie, it was really good to see the way all of the characters had their parts to play.
I did like the fact that this movie had a few nods to the original, even though no one knew the origins of the game. And it was good to see the usage of technology…and also how the events of the movie changed the characters by the end.
I definitely enjoyed watching this movie and it was one I would like to watch again in the future.
Ink of Blood 