The past few years have been littered with reboots, remakes and sequels.  New ‘Star Wars’ movies have been made, a female-driven version of ‘Ghostbusters’ and most recently a proclaimed sequel of the 1995 classic ‘Jumanji.’ The 2018 movie, ‘Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle,’ stars Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan and Nick Jonas. The film opens in the late 1990s where the iconic board game is found on the beach and is given to a teenage boy. He quickly dismisses it for his GameCube, making the game adapt and change into a video game.

Flash forward to present day and four very different teenagers are each given detention, resulting in them being told to clean out an abandoned room in their school. The students end up finding the game and quickly get sucked into the world of Jumanji. There they are transformed into the characters they initially chose as their avatars and must find a way to beat the game.

This movie ended up being much better than I had anticipated. Growing up, I loved the original and felt nothing but dismay when I heard there would be a sequel. However, I was delightfully surprised when I watched the movie and I was actually very entertained. Now, in no way is it close to being better than the original but it did end up being entertaining and enjoyable. There were problems I had with the script and overall flow of the movie, but for what it was, it wasn’t incredibly awful.

It also left me feeling extremely nostalgic and I immediately went home to watch the original. Throughout the movie I was constantly reminded of aspects of the first ‘Jumanji.’

Overall this was a fun movie that left me feeling less disgusted than I did walking in and I would recommend this movie to fans of the original.

18agonzalez@usd489.com