Jumanji is an ancient board game “for those who seek to find/A way to leave their world behind.” With each roll of the dice, the game conjures up an element of the jungle. The point is that the yoke of parental civilization keeps us from beauties, but also from beasts. But for Johnston’s four players – Robin Williams, Kirsten Dunst, Bonnie Hunt and Bradley Pierce – the game stirs up pure malice: man-eating plants, gun-toting monkeys, a stampede, a great white hunter hellbent on bagging Williams just for sport. The players have to keep going until somebody wins or the special-effects budget runs out.
It’s a sleek premise: what better field for fantasy than a world in which the membrane between civilization and the wilds opens at a roll of the dice? But the filmmakers seem interested in the jungle creatures only for their capacity to kill. The movie has no sense of wonder or play. Williams, reportedly paid $15 million for his role, is wasted. Tied to the rhythms of its computer-generated scenes of mayhem, the film has no time for fooling around. The jungle beasts are gratuitously nasty, the New England townsfolk no better. When elephants and rhinos are stampeding down the main drag, all the citizenry can think to do is loot the local department store.
The film may be inappropriate for the book’s young audience. At a screening, my 7-year-old crawled into my lap, terrified, and never left; I spent most of the film worrying for him, denied the cheap pleasures even a bad movie can deliver. In the end, he felt it was fun and not too scary, though he suggested a PG-8 rating. But as family Christmas movies go, “Jumanji” has all the cheer of a lump of coal.
