I forgot how much of the charm of the first movie had to do with these four main actor’s abilities to imitate teenage tropes and manipulate their faces and bodies to do their signature looks as if they were posable dolls. The sequel capitalizes on this mainstay by shifting through permutations of specific avatars representing various characters (most noticeably during the sidequest to recover the only-tangentially-useful Jumanji Fruit, when avatars are swapped to very directly play with this feature of the performance. Shout out to Karen Gillan and Jack Black for treading that fine line of black minstrelsy, especially you, Karen. No one has ever come closer to touching the sun than you without their wings melting off.
The second, more comprehensive party swap by means of Jumanji Fruit before the storming of the ice fort is actually sort of a conservative move, because it puts us back in the comfortable slots we remembered from the first movie. The original arrangement of the party has a bit of a gay subplot with Awkwafina (brilliantly cast as both a derpy young nerd and then Danny DeVito) and Karen Gillan, which seems kind of interesting and devious, because it tells the same awkward romantic plot of young people not comfortable in their own skin, living out their lives through fantastically enhanced versions of themselves, but tells it through two women who are not entirely comfortable with their own sexuality.
Part of the challenge with the part swapping is that the writers set for themselves their own obstacle which is making an arrangement that’s sympathetic, but can also be taken seriously between five human avatars and one black pegasus. The addition of Awkwafina and the pegasus allows for the gang to reunite and Danny Glover to make a noble sacrifice without removing Kevin Hart’s character from the series, but it also means that at some point, the audience is going to see someone tearfully address a horse in the most poignant end scene imaginable. So, the writers back themselves into a bit of a corner early on in order to get the end scene they want. It’s neat that they didn’t go for a different hunk and instead gave Awkwafina a little bit of a chance to clusmily flirt with Karen Gillan, because there wasn’t any reason why the extra character couldn’t be male. The comedy could have come from continuing to play up the crossed-wires attraction that Karen’s character feels for the avatar she fell in love with and the boy who inhabits a new body.
This film contains an odd combination of toxic relationship advice from the children and pretty good life advice on dating from Danny DeVito, which is maybe the opposite of what one might have expected. DeVito’s solid advice to his grandson is basically that at any given moment in New York there are ten women on any subway car that are wife material and you’ll be happy with four of them. Go forth and explore, so to speak. You are not limited to the choices you made when you were in high school. “Getting old… is a gift,” because we learn from our mistakes and live to see the impact of our good decisions. Whereas, while Karen Gillan and the Rock are climbing up the side of the Ice Fortress, Karen Gillan sets out a vision of imposter syndrome that sounds pretty fucking depressing: in high school I felt awkward and outcast, and then I went to college and everyone was nice to me and everyone paid attention to me and thought I was interesting, but I knew deep down inside that I’m not beautiful or interesting and I just waited for them to notice. And that’s why, she concludes, we need “our people,” willfully misunderstanding that term’s intended meaning, for the friends you have who will back you up despite recognizing your wrongness, and instead using it to justify the persistence of a long-distance romantic relationship that mostly grows out of a traumatic incident.
Because we recently found ourselves at a conundrum show in San Francisco, this film poses one of the great headscratchers of 2019: if you knew you only had three months to live with terminal cancer, would you live out that time with certain knowledge of your death or rather choose to live indefinitely as a pegasus in a video game until the event of your third video game death? We posed this to a couple at dinner the other day and one of them said, “Those things are so different from one another as to not even be relevant,” to which I reply BUT JUMANJI FOUND THEM RELEVANT. If time is precious, this is one you can safely skip, and I assume if you’re coming to this review a month after it’s come out, your chances of seeing this in theaters are pretty slim to none anyway. But if you’re up for one more ride, there is juice to squeeze out of this Rock yet.
