Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

Inside the Joke, Outside the Body

I’m always a little suspicious of movies that begin by apologizing for themselves, and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle has the look of something that knows exactly how goofy it is and wants credit for that self-awareness. But then it does something sneakier. It doesn’t just joke about being a reboot of a beloved property; it turns the reboot into the point.

The old board game becomes a video game, the video game becomes a body-swap comedy, and the body-swap comedy becomes a surprisingly sharp little riff on who gets to feel powerful in a teen adventure story. That’s more thoughtful than the marketing made it sound in 2017, and also a lot funnier.

The film arrived as a sequel-reboot hybrid, which is Hollywood’s least romantic phrase and, in this case, a useful one. It’s not trying to erase Jumanji so much as metabolize it. Jake Kasdan, who’d already shown a taste for broad comedy with a human pulse in Walk Hard and Sex Tape, keeps the movie moving like he’s dodging embarrassment at all times.

That’s a good instinct here. The movie would collapse if it ever paused long enough to admire its own cleverness. Instead, it keeps setting jokes in motion and letting them bounce off the mismatched bodies inside the jungle.

I’ve seen plenty of “nostalgia but updated!” projects that feel embalmed. This one feels more like it was built on a dare.

What I remember most isn’t the CGI creatures, which are fine, or the plot mechanics, which are serviceable. It’s the movie’s central comic idea: that identity is a costume you can get badly wrong. Dwayne Johnson’s enormous, apparently invincible Dr.

Smolder Bravestone is funny because he’s really just Alex Wolff’s anxious teenage Spencer trying to perform confidence at impossible scale. Kevin Hart, trapped inside the body of the athletic Franklin “Mouse” Finbar, turns exasperation into a high-speed art form. Jack Black, maybe the film’s smartest gamble, finds a whole comic register in inhabited awkwardness: a teen girl’s impatience, vanity, and social-media fluency rattling around in the body of a male geography professor.

That last joke could have gone stale in five minutes. Instead, Black keeps discovering new notes of embarrassment, delight, and wounded pride. He doesn’t just impersonate a teenage girl; he plays the terror of being seen inaccurately.

And that, I think, is why the movie travels better than you might expect. It’s not really about a jungle. It’s about the minor humiliations of adolescence, only translated into a fantasy environment where those humiliations are made literal.