The Jumanji Franchise (1995 / 2017 / 2019) Review

Three Films, One Game

I like all three Jumanji films, and I didn’t expect to. The original is a proper family adventure built around a surprisingly sad Robin Williams performance, and the 2017 reboot turned out to be a much cleverer idea than any sequel to a twenty-year-old film had a right to be. Even the third, the weakest, has enough good jokes to be worth an evening.

The idea at the heart of all three is the same: you play the game, and the game plays back. What changes is the game itself, from a wooden board with drums in 1995 to a video game cartridge in 2017, and what that change says about the audience each film was made for.

The Picture Book

It all started with Chris Van Allsburg’s 1981 picture book, a short, strange story about two bored children who find a board game in a park and discover that every roll of the dice makes the jungle real inside their house: a lion on the piano, monkeys in the kitchen, a monsoon in the living room. It won the Caldecott Medal, the highest honour in American children’s illustration.

Van Allsburg’s book is quiet and eerie, all shadowy black and white drawings, and it ends with the children leaving the game for two other children to find. The films are louder and bigger, but they all keep that core idea and that final unsettling note: the game is still out there, waiting for someone else to find it.

Jumanji (1995). 9/10

Joe Johnston directed the original. In 1969, a boy named Alan Parrish finds the game buried at a construction site and starts playing it with his friend Sarah. On his first roll he’s sucked inside it, and Sarah runs away in terror as bats pour out of the house. Twenty-six years later, two orphaned children, Judy and Peter, move into the empty Parrish house with their aunt, find the game in the attic and start to play.

Their first rolls bring giant mosquitoes and a troop of vandalising monkeys. A few rolls later, a lion appears, and then, out of the game, comes Alan, now a bearded man in a loincloth, twenty-six years older and very angry about it. He discovers his parents are dead, his town is ruined and he still has to finish the game he started as a boy. That means finding Sarah and making her play too.

Robin Williams’ Alan

Williams plays Alan as a boy trapped in a man’s body, twenty-six years behind the world. He comes out of the jungle wild and terrified, finds his parents’ house empty and his father’s shoe factory closed, and has to face everything he lost. It’s a sad role for a family film, and Williams gives it real weight: his fear of the game and his grief for his father are genuine.

He’s also very funny, as you’d expect, but the comedy never overwhelms the sadness. Without spoiling it completely, the ending gives Alan a second chance at the life he lost, and a chance to say to his father what he never could as a boy. It’s one of the most moving things Williams did in a family film.

Van Pelt

The game releases a hunter called Van Pelt, who stalks Alan through the town with a rifle, determined to finish what he started in the jungle. He’s played by Jonathan Hyde, who also plays Alan’s stern, disapproving father in the opening scenes, the man who wanted his son to toughen up and stand his ground against bullies.

It’s a clever piece of casting that many audiences miss: the thing that hunts Alan is the thing he ran from as a boy. The film never spells it out, and it gives the fantasy a real emotional spine. When Alan finally stands his ground against Van Pelt, he’s facing his father too, and the scene works on both levels.

Sarah and the Children

Bonnie Hunt plays Sarah, the girl who ran away when Alan was sucked into the game, and who has spent twenty-six years being treated as mad for telling people what happened. Her terror of the drums, the sound the game makes when it wants to be played, and her decision to finish the game anyway give the film its second emotional thread.

Kirsten Dunst and Bradley Pierce play Judy and Peter, the orphaned siblings who have their own grief to deal with. Dunst, at thirteen, is already very good, and the film treats the children’s loss seriously. By the end, all four players have been changed by the game. That change is the real story.

The 1995 Effects

The stampede through the town, the monsoon flooding the house, the crocodiles in the living room and the plants that swallow furniture were cutting edge in 1995, created by Industrial Light and Magic. They look it now. The computer-generated animals are the weak point, rubbery and weightless, and the monkeys in particular have not aged well.

The practical effects, the sets and the performances hold up far better, and the story carries it past the dated technology. It’s the rare effects-driven film of its decade that still works, because the effects were always in service of the characters. The scene of the stampede thundering through the house and out through the wall is dated in its textures and still thrilling in its staging.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017). 8/10

Jake Kasdan directed the reboot, and it opens with a smart update. In 1996, the old board game is found on a beach, and a teenage boy ignores it. Overnight, it turns itself into a video game cartridge, and when the boy plays it, he’s swallowed. Twenty years later, four high school students in detention find the old console in a storeroom and plug it in.

Each chooses an avatar without reading the descriptions, and all four are sucked into the jungle, where they find they’ve become those avatars. They each have three lives, shown as tattoos on their arms, and a list of strengths and weaknesses. The game logic, levels, non-player characters repeating their lines, cut-scenes, becomes both the joke and the structure.

The Casting Swap

The film works because every avatar is the opposite of the teenager playing it. Spencer, a nervous, allergic gamer, becomes Dwayne Johnson’s Dr Smolder Bravestone, whose strengths include smouldering intensity. Fridge, a football star, becomes Kevin Hart’s tiny zoologist, whose weakness is cake. Bethany, a phone-obsessed popular girl, becomes Jack Black’s overweight middle-aged cartographer. And Martha, shy and awkward, becomes Karen Gillan’s Ruby Roundhouse, a martial artist.

Each actor plays the teenager inside, not the avatar, and the comedy comes from the gap. Jack Black, playing a teenage girl stuck in a middle-aged man’s body, is the funniest thing in the entire franchise, and Johnson is delightful as a shy boy suddenly given muscles he doesn’t know how to use.

Martha’s Lesson

The best character arc in the reboot belongs to Martha. She’s clever and can’t make eye contact at school, and she becomes a martial artist whose one weakness is venom. The scene where Jack Black’s avatar teaches her how to flirt as a combat technique, to distract a pair of guards, is one of the funniest in the series.

Gillan plays both the teenager’s embarrassment and the avatar’s lethal skill at the same time, and by the end, Martha has learned something the game couldn’t give her: that she was capable all along. It’s the reboot’s clearest example of what the whole franchise is about, a game that forces people to become who they could be.

The Lost Player

Welcome to the Jungle also has a sad subplot. The four find another player in the jungle, a pilot called Seaplane, played by Nick Jonas. He’s the boy who vanished in 1996, and he’s been living in the game ever since, using his last life carefully, not knowing that twenty years have passed.

When the group gets out, time snaps back for him, and the film’s final scene shows what his lost years became. It’s a direct nod to Alan Parrish, and it gives the reboot the same bittersweet note as the original. The franchise never forgets that being trapped in the game costs you something real.

Jumanji: The Next Level (2019). 7/10

The 2019 sequel brings the four back, along with Spencer’s grandfather Eddie and his estranged old friend Milo, played by Danny DeVito and Danny Glover, whose minds end up inside Johnson’s and Hart’s avatars. Watching Johnson do a DeVito impression and Hart imitate Glover’s slow, careful speech is funny for a while and wears thin.

The new levels, a desert chase with ostriches and a sequence of mandrills on swinging rope bridges, are handsome and exciting, and the plot is looser and sillier. Awkwafina, playing a new avatar who ends up with DeVito’s personality, is the best new addition. It’s the weakest of the three, but it’s still good fun.

The Rules of the Game

Both versions of Jumanji work because the game has rules and the characters have to follow them. In 1995, you can’t stop playing until someone reaches the end, every roll unleashes something worse, and cheating is punished: Peter tries to drop the dice to move ahead and is slowly turned into a monkey. The game is fair in its cruelty, and the players must be fair back.

In 2017, the rules are borrowed from video games. Each player has three lives. Each avatar has fixed strengths and weaknesses, printed on a character card. You can’t leave until you finish the level. The rules create tension and comedy at the same time: the audience always knows what’s at stake and what the characters can and can’t do, so every choice matters, and every lost life is a real loss.

That’s the franchise’s great strength, and it’s why the sequels mostly work where other reboots of that era failed. The game is the constant. The players change.

Watching Them Together

If you have a weekend, watch all three in order. The original is the most emotional, the second the funniest and the third the loosest. Together they make a good run for a family that likes adventure, and the change from board game to video game is a neat way of updating the idea for a new generation without dropping what made it work.

The newer films also pay quiet tribute to the original. There’s a nod to Alan Parrish in Welcome to the Jungle, and the lost player Seaplane mirrors Alan’s story directly. Robin Williams died in 2014, before the reboot was made, and the tribute feels warm and sincere. It’s the right way to honour a film that meant a lot to a generation of children.

Craft Note

The Verdict on The Jumanji Franchise

Yes, in order. The original is a 9 and the most moving of the three, Welcome to the Jungle is an 8 and the funniest, and The Next Level is a 7 and the loosest. Watch the first two at least. For younger children, start with Welcome to the Jungle; for older children and adults, start with Robin Williams.

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