(ADVENTURE/COMEDY)
★★
Directed by Jake Kasdan
Screenplay by Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers and Scott Rosenberg & Jeff Pinkner
Screen Story by Chris McKenna
Based on Jumanji by Chris Van Allsburg and the 1995 screen story/screenplay by Greg Taylor
Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan, Rhys Darby, Bobby Cannavale, Nick Jonas, Alex Wolff, Ser'Darius Blain, Madison Iseman, Morgan Turner, Marc Evan Jackson, Missi Pyle
Rated PG-13 for adventure action, suggestive content and some language.
119 minutes
Verdict: Although a marginal improvement on the 1995 original, it has few inspired aspects outside of Jack Black's deft comic performance as a teenage girl.
As great an actor as Robin Williams was himself, many of the movies he starred in were, well, frankly, crap. The 1995 blockbuster JUMANJI, for example, was an inexplicably mean-spirited "family" thriller with an abundance of bad CGI effects based on a strange and slightly creepy picture book by Chris Van Allsburg about a menacing board game that brings the perils of a fictional jungle to very real life. It's a good concept, but looking honestly at the original movie, there's a lot to improve upon. So, crass though it was for Sony to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Williams's death with the announcement of a Jumanji reboot/remake fast-tracked for production, of all the Williams movies to revisit, it was one of the more promising options. This time, rather than centering the adventure around a main star, JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE brings an ensemble and updates the concept (already done as a board game by the original film and the 2005 movie ZATHURA) to a video game. Connected to the 1995 movie more by a sense of obligation than any by anything substantial or worthwhile, a prologue sums up how the "Jumanji" board game became a video game of a similar breed, then moves to the present day, where the primitive game console is discovered in a high school basement by four students in detention. Switching on the game and nonchalantly choosing their avatars from the game's roster, the kids are magically transported directly into the world of the game and transformed into physical manifestations of the characters they chose only moments ago. Geeky social outcast Spencer (Alex Wolff) becomes the beefy and ultra-capable explorer Dr. Smolder Bravestone (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), athletic high school football prodigy Fridge (Ser'Darius Blain) becomes the short-statured zoologist Franklin "Mouse" Finbar, social media-addicted popular girl Bethany (Madison Oberon) becomes the overweight cartographer Sheldon "Shelly" Oberon (Jack Black), and awkward weird girl Martha (Morgan Turner) becomes the sexy martial artist Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan). Exposition is efficiently dealt out by a non-player character and the quartet are set out on a perilous jounrey through a fantastical jungle to return a mystical jewel to its rightful place in order to return to the real world, while the sinister explorer Russell Van Pelt (Bobby Cannavale) and his forces pursue them.
Perhaps it's appropriate, given the clear nostalgia angle of the production, that JUMANJI feels rather like a kids adventure movie of the 1990s, with an intrusive syrupy sentimentality and specific challenge for each character to overcome and reach the end with a "wow, I really learned something there" vibe by the end. The effects, while markedly improved on the very dated CGI of the '95 movie, look cheap by the standards of today, and director Jake Kasdan, best known for middling comedies like BAD TEACHER and ORANGE COUNTY, treats the action as obligatory and misses the opportunity for the fun ROMANCING THE STONE/Indiana Jones-style action the premise promises. The commitment to the video game concept varies, sometimes laying on thick in the interest of comic gags, other times appearing to pander an audience that would more likely stay at home playing video games than be at the theater, and occasionally, it throws it all away for unnecessary exposition scenes with Cannavale's super generic villain. Three of the four leads, however, are surprisingly well played, with Johnson convincingly adopting the mannerisms of an awkward teenage boy within all his charismatic action star bulk, and Gillan, similarly giving an impressive physical performance as gawky nonconformist trapped in the skin of a sexy video game commando (the movie makes a brief point of commenting on the illogical and arguably misogynist portrayal of a midriff-baring, booty shorts-wearing jungle adventurer, but come on, movie, you're still doing it, too). The movie's best jokes by far, however, come from Jack Black's enthusiastic performance as the vapid teenage girl Bethany, who suffers from a number of teen cliches like cell phone addiction, but through Black's softened intonations and fascination with her stout male form is derived more than a few solid laughs. Hart, who has his enthusiastic fans, is a decent comic performer, but stands apart from his co-stars and sticks to his schtick while never venturing very close to reminding anyone who his character is.In the end, JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE is a shallow and familiar sort of holiday season release, an okay excuse to bring the family to the movies, but neither an especially funny (or unfunny) comedy or a particularly exciting (or particularly dull) adventure. It's lukewarm, but Jack Black delivers as a teenage girl.
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| JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE Images via Sony |
(MUSICAL/FAMILY)
★1/2
Directed by Michael Gracey
Screenplay by Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon
Story by Jenny Bicks
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Michelle Williams, Zac Efron, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Austyn Johnson, Cameron Seely, Keala Settle, Sam Humphrey, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eric Anderson, Ellis Rubin, Skylar Dunn
Rated PG for thematic elements including a brawl.
105 minutes
Verdict: Either gobsmackingly innocent or utterly full of crap, this flabbergasting family musical's cannot be saved by its scarce moments of true musical showmanship.
When I read a year ago that Hugh Jackman was to star in an original movie musical about the life of P.T. Barnum, it sounded awesome. We've been getting a bit more since FROZEN and LA LA LAND, but there's something special about a good and glitzy Hollywood musical, and the original ones are even more unique. So it's especially disappointing that THE GREATEST SHOWMAN's ambitions are so, well, mediocre, and its sensibilities are so dishonest. Yes, it's a musical, with original songs, the music and lyrics by LA LA LAND's Pasek and Paul (the music for LA LA LAND's songs, however, was composed by Justin Hurwitz), but in almost every other respect, it has the manner of a low-rent holiday season family film, with a main cast that's far above this sort of material. This is no CHICAGO or MOULIN ROUGE, and it's certainly no LA LA LAND. This is more like DOLPHIN TALE, or WE BOUGHT A ZOO, or THE BLIND SIDE, but with pop songs. It's choice of subject matter is flabbergasting, its production is so-so, and its sentiments are either too innocent to be believed, or deceitful and foul in the worst way. While the truth behind the story is important, even if it were completely unconnected from any true-life figures (and to be fair, aside from the use of names, it practically is that), its ultra-safe, feel-good depiction of 19th century freak show exhibitions can't help but feel wrong. Its well-marketed anthem, "This is Me", as performed by Broadway actress Keala Settle, who performs the Barnum Circus's bearded lady, is a eye-rolling proclamation for outsiders from the perspective of true social insiders. It's a version of the story for well-positioned people who think of themselves as outsiders, and it's erroneous.
Jackman stars as a highly-fictionalized version of Phineas Taylor Barnum, a 19th century New York entrepreneur who opens a museum to make his fortune with the full support of his picture-perfect family, including his wife Charity (Michelle Williams) and two daughters, and assembles a collection of biological oddities like the minuscule Charles Stratton (Sam Humphrey), who Barnum promises a chance for respect and to not be laughed at but still exhibits in a Napoleonesque uniform under the moniker "General Tom Thumb," the bearded woman Lettie Lutz (Settle), and Prince Constantine the tattooed man (Shannon Holtzapffel). There's also Anne Wheeler (Zendaya) and W.D. Wheeler (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), the black brother and sister trapeze performers, whose race plays a contrived moral role in the story. Soon all the ignorant types and sourpusses in the city are clamoring to have Barnum's exhibits shut down, as portrayed via a seemingly perpetual mob of dockworkers, the sort of broad portrayal of social ignorance that any viewer can happily apply to whatever faction they see as their antagonist. Nothing complicated, nothing messy, nothing interesting. The course of the movie follows Barnum as he pursues greater fame and success, not for anything of greed but to "make people happy" and gain a sense of importance. Along the way, he recruits the fictional aristocrat Philip Carlyle (Zac Efron) to bring a greater sense of legitimacy to his business, and brings the Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson, from MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE- ROGUE NATION) to the United States that finally brings him respect in the artistic community. However, this is the type of lame children's movie where success inevitably changes Barnum and he forgets that without his freak show (for lack of a better term), he wouldn't have gotten to where he is, and lessons have to be learned and it's all very familiar.
It's not entirely without merit. There are a few brief moments of entertaining, peppy dance choreography and rhythm, most notably in the prologue number "The Greatest Show" and "The Other Side", in which Barnum struggles to convince Carlyle to join his enterprise inside a bar where stools and counters take part in the back-and-forth between Jackman and Efron, both of whom come with previous musical experience. Certainly for Efron, though, this feels like a regression into High School Musical territory, including a romance with a black trapeze artist (Zendaya) with racial tensions that would feel tame in a Disney Channel original movie. For Jackman, I guess he was in REAL STEEL, so he does have those weird spots in his filmography, but what he's doing in this, I don't know. According to Variety, Jackman also brought in his LOGAN director James Mangold to help pick up the slack from first-time director Michael Gracey (whose background is in visual effects) in re-shoots and post-production, but its unclear without further context what impact Mangold has on the finished film. Michelle Williams, a very fine actress, is in this as Barnum's wife with very little to do, very much in a "behind every great man is a great woman" sort of role that's easy to forget for long stretches is even there and which Williams's talent is wasted in.
If it's simply full of shit, perhaps its just the sort of tribute the famous huckster Barnum deserves, but even then, it possesses barely a modicum of the glitz and glamour of its modern musical peers. It's a manufactured confection with all the sugar and none of the flavor. Perhaps it really is as naive as it appears, but it's tempting to be embarrassed for it before remembering that it's such a hypocritical corporate product.
THE GREATEST SHOWMAN is a movie for people who feel that mayonnaise is more than a bit too spicy. It's for people with squeaky clean reputations but who are fascinated with how "interesting" they are. It's for people who still think the early Beatles' hair was too long. It's childlike without the sense of wonder.
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| THE GREATEST SHOWMAN Images via 20 Century Fox |
