Letterboxd Review - Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)
It's a sequel! That means bigger explosions, more exotic settings, a new powerful bad guy...et cetera. Jumanji: The Next Level has all of that, leading movie archeologists in the future to write it off as your typical big-budget action adventure sequel. Like The Mummy Returns , or Journey 2: The Mysterious Island . It is not one of those. It's far better. But it does show some of the familiar symptoms of sequel-itis. The real magic trick of these Jumanji movies is they allow their superstar-studded main cast to do a fair bit of actual acting. While this entry's body-swap comedy premise feels flimsy and random from a screenwriting point of view, it affords Jack Black, Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, and Kevin Hart the opportunity to again quietly disappear into a completely different character. I feel they are allowed to get away with this because they are in the foreground of a $150 million pre-vis studio tentpole that can be easily sold in other markets. Johnson and Hart,