Jumanji: The Next Level

Running on Borrowed Lives

What I keep thinking about in Jumanji: The Next Level is not the spectacle — though there’s plenty of that — but the odd little panic of being stuck in someone else’s body and having to improvise a self on the fly. That’s the franchise’s smartest trick, and Jake Kasdan understands it well enough to keep returning to it with a light, mischievous touch. This isn’t a sequel that wants to deepen the mythology so much as it wants to keep shaking the box and seeing what personality combinations fall out.

In 2017’s Welcome to the Jungle, the joke was that teenagers got trapped inside avatar bodies built from genre caricature. Here, the joke gets stranger and, in a way, more human: the game begins swapping identities around, as if the film is asking whether any of us are really stable enough to deserve our own face.

Kasdan’s gift, if I can call it that, is knowing the exact point at which a joke stops being a joke and becomes a bit of character work. He came to this series after a run of comedies that prized awkwardness over polish, and that sensibility still shapes these movies. The camera doesn’t worship the digital environments; it uses them as a stage for bodies in friction.

People collide, hesitate, overcompensate. That’s where the pleasure lives. And because this is a sequel to a reboot — itself a sequel to a beloved Robin Williams film — it carries a slightly absurd burden: it has to be familiar enough to feel like Jumanji, but flexible enough to justify another trip inside the machine.

So it answers by becoming even more elastic, letting the cast play against type in ways that are funny first and revealing second.

The central conversation around the film, at least to my eye, was whether it could repeat the original’s joke without draining it of life. I think the answer is yes — mostly because the movie doesn’t merely repeat it, it mutates it. The body-swap conceit becomes the engine for a kind of comic anthropology.

Dwayne Johnson, who has spent much of his screen career radiating competence with a grin, gets to play a character channeling Kevin Hart’s anxious velocity. Hart, in turn, has to occupy Johnson’s bigger, slower frame, and the result is less impersonation than a study in mismatched souls. Jack Black continues to be one of the great modern practitioners of self-parody; he plays insecurity with such complete physical commitment that every slouch and sideways glance feels earned.