Jumanji: The Next Level

“Where’s the jungle? This is a whole new thing. Nobody told us we had to do a whole new thing!”

Professor Shelly Oberon

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle was a surprise hit for me and I think the rest of the world as well. A sequel/reboot that nobody had asked for, brand new cast, comedic approach, and coming a year after Sony’s failed Ghostbusters: Answer the Call, I for sure wasn’t betting on it being that great but it quickly turned into one of my favorite and most re-watched comedies ever. I was very excited, but cautiously optimistic once they announced a sequel, because you can only really capture lightning in a bottle once, right? As it turns out, you can only do it once, but Jumanji: The Next Level doesn’t fall too far away from the tree even though it wasn’t quite on the same level as the previous installment (pun was fully intended).

The concept of going back into the partially working game after repairing the console and dealing with the glitches that come with that I think was a great opportunity for laughs and the ability to do quite a bit with the sequel, but I don’t think they leaned into it as hard as they could’ve. They play around with those ideas for the first half of the movie, which was great, I laughed a lot, but then by the second half there was a lot of re-used jokes and beats from the last one. I really loved all the different environments, and with those new environments gave our characters unique challenges they had to face, on top of the game being broken made for some great sequences, one of my favorites taking place in the desert.

I thought all the characters once again had great chemistry together, last time we got lots of Johnson and Hart moments (in this one we still do), but I loved all the Gillan and Black moments, I felt they drove the story the hardest and I enjoyed getting to spend more time with these two characters and getting to know them better. We also get some new characters introduced to the game as well, I won’t say who they are or which characters avatars they are because I was pleasantly surprised by those and don’t want to ruin that surprise for others. Even though this one had several more characters than last time, I think they added rather than took away from the story.

The biggest thing that hurt this movie right off the bat for me was it’s second trailer. I could tell by watching it that a lot of the bigger jokes were being used in the marketing, and I wish they had held back on some of them until the movie had released. There’s still plenty that wasn’t shown in the trailers, and I laughed a lot during this movie, but there’s a couple surprises that they shouldn’t have shown.

Even though this movie isn’t nearly on par with the original, it wasn’t bad but it wasn’t great. I still laughed, the characters and sequences were a whole lot of fun to watch, but it didn’t have the surprisingly good aspect that Welcome to the Jungle pulled off so expertly. It came out really quickly after the last one, so I think if they had given the script time to breathe and given it some edits it would’ve felt less rushed I’m going to give Jumanji: The Next Level a 6.5/10 and I’ll probably be seeing it at least one more time in theaters because it was still pretty fun. What did you think of the third Jumanji film? Would you like to see more, or would you prefer they stop?