Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (****)

To be honest, I don't remember a whole lot about 1995's "Jumanji" (with Robin Williams and Bonnie Hunt) aside from some scary monsters and a curiously dark tone. What little anticipation I had to see such a curious sequel over 20 years later is well earned; WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE is something so pure that I assume the original was trying to be: a comedy.

The board game from the first film is back, washed up on a beach in 1996 (I remember the kids disposed of it somehow in the first film, but was it really dumped in the sea?) and discovered by a gamer teen in 1996. 20 years later, the film jumps ahead to stories about this missing boy and the haunted house he used to live in.

We meet a gang of misfit teenagers who find themselves in detention for one reason or another (the setup is identical to last year's dismal Power Rangers). It's the usual crowd: the popular girl, the football jock, his geeky childhood friend, and a shy but defiant girl who would rather skip gym in favor of history. The kids discover the Jumanji game in the bowels of the school (now transformed into a video game for purposes of plot, nothing more) and as unlikely as it is, they enter the world only hinted of by Robin Williams before.

The movie is absurdly goofy, full of nonsensical lines of dialogue and characters. And yet it makes sense. The kids are transformed into their video game avatars (the geek becomes Dwayne Johnson, the jock becomes Kevin Hart, and the hottie hilariously becomes an overweight Jack Black). They essentially play the game from the introduction of the villains all the way through increasingly difficult levels and bosses. The movie aims for nothing more than to be a silly laugh, and boy does it work. It's clear the movie is only a vehicle to get big-named stars to appear (otherwise, why not have the actual kids journey through the adventure?), but in the end, who cares?