Cinemavenger

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Jumanji: The Next Level

If the Christmas blues and all the end-of-decade, New Year's regrets and fears festivities didn't already have you strolling the rope aisle at Home Depot looking for just the right combination of strength and silky smoothness so that you could hang your miserable ass, Jumanji: The Next Level may be the last, little push you need to commit to the great beyond.

Then again, if you made it through the last one, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, without offing yourself, you  might survive this one, too.  Unless the effect is cumulative, because Jumanji: The Next Level is pretty much exactly the same movie as Welcome to the Jungle. 

Jumanji has morphed from the supernatural board game from the Robin Williams version into a video game in the current, rebooted series.  If you didn't already pick up on that from the reference to the "next level" in the title, you might want to sit this one out, because even though it's not based on an actual video game, Jumanji: The Next Level is a video game movie from start button to end screen, which means its sucks as much as it lacks a reason for existing.

At least last time the teenagers ended up inside the life-and-death-stakes world of the game by accident.  This time, one of them voluntarily goes back in.  Not because he has to save the love of his life.  Not because the fate of the world hangs in the balance.  Not for free fucking fries at McDonald's.  But because he's feeling a little down in the dumps after the first half of his freshman year at college.

You have got to be fucking kidding me!  How am I not a successful screenwriter when that's what passes for credible motivation these days?  Fuck me! 

I guess the Rock doing a Danny DeVito impression while Kevin Hart channels Danny Glover for forty minutes qualifies as killer log line and creative hilarity these days?  Trust me, it don't.

December 27, 2019