Jumanji (1995)

Starring: Robin Williams, Bonnie Hunt, Kirsten Dunst, Bradley Pierce, David Alan Grier, Bebe Neuwirth, Jonathan Hyde, and Patricia Clarkson
Grade: C+

Don’t let nostalgic Robin Williams fans lie to you and tell you Jumanji is some sort of “game-changing” film. It’s not.

Summary

In 1869, two younger boys bury some chest emitting a thumping sound into the ground, ridding themselves of it. They are afraid of whatever is inside.

In 1969 in Brantford, New Hampshire, a young Alan Parrish is chased by some bullies, led by a mean kid named Billy. Billy wants to beat him up because he thinks Alan is trying to steal his girlfriend Sarah Whittle, even though he insists they’re just friends. Alan rides his bike as fast as possible to his father Sam’s (Hyde) shoe-making factory. He runs inside, but the bullies make it known they will wait outside for him. While inside, Alan talks with Carl Bentley (Grier), a worker at Sam’s company that he’s friends with. After Carl shows Alan the prototype for the new shoe he created that he plans on showing Sam at their appointment in the afternoon, Sam shows up and tells Alan to not mess around in the factory. Alan lays Carl’s prototype shoe on some conveyer belt and asks Sam for a ride home. However, Sam correctly presumes it’s because of Billy, and he refuses to take him, telling him he needs to face this kid if he’s afraid of him. Next, Sam goes and asks Carl what he wanted to show him. Excited, Carl goes and looks for the shoe. As he does, the already-in-action conveyer belt goes about its business and destroys the shoe, breaking the machine at the same time. Alan realizes it’s his fault after seeing Sam demand to know who did it, but Carl takes the blame for it. Then, Alan goes outside and gets his ass kicked by the bullies. They steal his bike too. Once they leave, a wounded Alan gets up and hears a thumping sound coming from the nearby construction site. He finds where the sound is emitting from and digs into the dirt to pull out the mysterious chest from the opening of the movie.

Inside of this chest is the enchanted board game Jumanji. After seeing a construction worker look in his direction, he frantically grabs the game and runs back home.

Alan goes in the living room and opens this jungle-themed game, grabbing two pawns stored in the side of it. Alan’s mother Carol (Clarkson) startles him by calling for him, so he accidentally drops the pawns on the board. Unbeknownst to him, they magically moved to the two starting positions on the board by themselves. That night, Sam and Carol prepare for some prestigious dinner Sam is making a speech at. Before they leave, they speak to Alan first. Sam apologizes about telling him to face his bully because he didn’t know it was an entire group, but he does say he’s proud of him. Seeing this as something deserving of a reward, he says Alan is ready to attend this all-boys boarding school that generations of the Parrish family have attended. Alan sees this as another opportunity to be bullied at because the school is named after Sam’s father, and he and Sam get into an argument over it because Alan has no interest in going. Sam storms out with Carol, promising to send Alan there next Sunday. Once they leave, Alan plans on running away. He packs his things and grabs the Jumanji board game. However, right when he gets to the door, Sarah Whittle knocks. She came over to give Alan his bike back from Billy. Alan doesn’t seem to care and tries to leave, though he stops once he realizes that Sarah heard the thumping sound that only he has been hearing. He grabs her and decides to show her Jumanji. After reading off some of the rules, Sarah says she quit playing board games five years ago and drops the dice on the board. Unfortunately, the magical game took this as a roll and her pawn moves by itself. Now, they are both intrigued.

Next, they notice a message popping up in the center of the game, and it alludes to “winged things” attacking. They start hearing noises and get freaked out, so Sarah tells him to put the game away. Alan agrees and grabs the die, but the grandfather clock going off scares him. As a result, he drops the dice on the board, and it counts as a roll again. The fateful message then pops up: “In the jungle you must wait, until the dice read five or eight“. Alan is then inexplicably sucked into the board game, as Sarah screams her head off. Right after this, loads of bats fly out of the fireplace and attack, chasing Sarah right out of the house.

Twenty-six years later, a young Judy (Dunst) and her younger brother Peter (Pierce) go with their Aunt Nora (Neuwirth) to the former Parrish mansion she just bought. She’s thinking about turning it into a bed and breakfast. Judy and Peter now live with Aunt Nora because their parents died in a car accident. After the realtor tries to talk to the very quiet Peter, who still misses his parents very much, Judy messes with her by telling her a bunch of lies about her parents. That night, as the three get settled in, Peter gets scared by seeing a bat in the attic and runs to Nora and Judy. Nora checks on it and locks the door after hearing some screeching. They call in some guy to check on it, but he doesn’t find anything, even though Judy points out the exact bat Peter saw in some book. The guy however notes that this is an African bat and that “some girl” (Sarah Whittle) in the 60s said she saw it, but it’s impossible because they don’t get those types of bats out there. The guy assures her that whatever Peter saw is gone now, and they shouldn’t be worried about it. Instead, he tells them they should be worried about the fact that they live in a house where a young boy named Alan Parrish was “murdered”. He blames the father for it and says he could’ve hidden the body all over this gigantic house, especially if he chopped it into pieces.

That evening for dinner, the two come back from their first day at the new school, and Nora is mad because she already had to talk to the principal about their behavior. They change the subject, and Judy immediately brings up the fact that Nora got the house so cheap because Alan Parrish was “murdered”. Nora gets mad at Judy for lying and grounds her, but Judy insists she’s telling the truth as she goes to her room. That night, Judy hears the thumping and goes to Peter’s room. The two talk for a bit, but Peter insists he doesn’t hear any thumping himself, though he’s lying through his teeth. The next morning, Nora leaves the two alone because she has to get a permit. They have to wait for the bus anyway, so it’s cool. However, they stop in their tracks because they both hear the thumping again. Nora notices them acting weird and tries to make sure they are fine, but they tell her everything is cool. Once Nora leaves, the two run straight into the attic to investigate the sound.

They follow the noise, and it leads them straight to Jumanji. Judy goes first, and the message in the center tells them of an insect that can sting you. Right after this, some massive-looking mosquito’s attack. Judy is able to fight them off however, so the bugs have to escape through the window. Peter goes next. This time because of the message, a group of chaotic monkeys appear in the kitchen and start destroying shit. After realizing that stuff is coming alive because of it, they decide to read more of the directions of the game. There, it says to not begin the game unless you intend on finishing it, though the consequences of the game vanish once it’s all over. The final move of the game is when your pawn reaches the center of the board, and you say “Jumanji” out loud. As Judy reads this, the monkeys escape the house. Realizing the house is already messed up and that Nora is going to be very mad if things don’t go back to normal, Judy tells Peter they need to finish the game, so everything fixes itself like the game says it will. Because of this, Peter goes again because he rolled a double. This time around, he rolls a “5”. A lion appears because of the new consequence of the game. As they run away though, they are saved by a now grown adult Alan Parrish (Williams), who traps the lion in one of the bedrooms.

Alan, realizing he’s finally escaped the jungle, is ecstatic and thanks a startled Peter and Judy. He runs around the house looking for his parents, but Judy tells him that this is their home now, and they don’t know where his parents are. She gives him a minor breakdown of what happened, and reality starts to set in. Alan goes outside and Carl, now a police officer, drives and almost hits Alan who jumps onto the hood. Considering Alan looks like a crazy homeless person (he has never shaved or cut his hair since the night he was sucked into Jumanji), Carl starts questioning him. Judy and Peter come out and cover for him, explaining how he is their uncle. Alan sees Carl’s name tag, and it starts to come back to him who he is, but he’s thrown off track again once he sees a couple of moneys run inside Carl’s police car and drive off with it. Carl runs after his car, so Alan runs to go try and find his parents. Judy and Peter run after Alan.

He makes it to the shoe factory, but it’s now abandoned. One guy is settled in where the office used to be, so Alan goes up to talk to him. The guy is very nice, but he tells Alan the sad truth about what happened to the company. Apparently, Sam put everything he had into finding Alan. After a while, he stopped coming to work and stopped caring about life in general. Both of Alan’s parents passed on without ever knowing what happened to him. He goes to see their plot at the cemetery. Saddened and distraught, Alan starts to walk away, but Judy tries to convince him to help them finish the game. He’s not interested. Immediately after, they see an ambulance hit a woman’s car. It’s the realtor and not only is she injured, but she’s also been stung by one of the mosquitoes from earlier. As the EMTs take her away, Alan, Judy, and Peter jump in her car. Following this, they are attacked by the poisonous mosquitoes again. This forces them to drive off back to the house. Back there, Alan is still adamant about not being involved in the game and gets cleaned up with a shave, a shower, and clean clothes. They ask him again, but he has no interest, so Peter calls him “scared” to get him riled up. Alan gets super defensive and tells him about the horrors of the game and how they won’t last without him. He agrees to observe as they play to help out. Continuing on, Judy rolls, but her pawn doesn’t move. This is where Alan realizes that all four pawns are still on the board, meaning this current game is the same one Alan started in 1969!

He has to play for it to continue and to end this once and for all. Judy tries to give him the dice, but Alan tells her that it’s still not his turn. Technically, it’s the now grown adult Sarah Whittle’s (Hunt). Now, they have to find her, convince her to re-join this terrifying game that also ruined her life, and continue Jumanji until the game is finally complete and things can go back to normal.

My Thoughts:

This is not a family movie. I don’t know how long they’ve gotten away with marketing Jumanji as “fun for the whole family” but I assure you, it’s far from it. This movie is dark, grim, and potentially traumatizing if you show it to too young of an age group. Anybody who says this is a great family movie is running off the fumes of nostalgia. It’s a solid adventure movie with a creative premise, but it’s way too sad and depressing if your goal is to focus on entertaining children.

Think about it what has happened to these characters because of this stupid fucking board game.

Alan Parrish misses his entire childhood because of this game, having to live in a jungle and fight off animals and hunters for 26 fucking years, praying to God that he wouldn’t die while not knowing if he would ever make back to his life as a simple child again. Can you imagine that? He’s lost to a jungle with no way out and has to figure out how to live life in survival mode for 26 nightmare-inducing years?! This kid couldn’t fight off a bully, but he’s supposed to fend off jungle cats, snakes, and insects that can kill him? I can’t imagine a scarier situation for a child. Then, when he finally gets out, he finds out his parents are dead! Not only are they dead, but they died following a severe depression, especially his father Sam. He assumed Alan ran away because of something he said. Living with this guilt, Sam exhausted every resource he had to try and find his only child. The parents both died without ever finding out the truth to what happened, never having a happy day in their lives ever again. They passed away completely traumatized over one argument, and they never got to see Alan to tell him sorry or that they love him. More than likely, they thought it was their fault too, making this even more distressing. It’s awful what Alan went through, but I can’t even fathom the emotional distress the parents went through at the same time.

If you want an idea as to what Sam went through to try and find Alan, think about all the buildup of Mel Gibson’s character in Ransom. Alright, now imagine that after everything he does to get his child back, they find out the kid died anyway. This level of devastation regarding Sam and Alan is the background to this “fun” adventure, and I couldn’t forget about it no matter how “creative” this crazy boardgame premise is.

This depressing characterization for the development of Alan sucks the fun out of the idea of the film.

Really, it’s the type of shit that keeps you up at night.

These thoughts continue. A now grown Alan then realizes he never got to apologize for getting mad at his parents in the first place, and it starts to set in that the last thing he said to them was that he’s never talking to them again. So, on top of having PTSD from the jungle and living in fear for most of his life, he lost the only two people that loved him. The first thing he asks when he returns is, “Where’s my mom and dad?”. It hits you like a fucking brick. Going along with this, Judy and Peter’s parents die in a car accident for the sole purpose of giving us one funny moment at the end of the movie. Why do these kids have to suffer too?

Though it’s not touched on, Alan even went through PUBERTY in the jungle. Can you imagine the sick things he must’ve explored with no supervision or guidance whatsoever? This could’ve been a movie in itself! It would be like Cast Away meets Tarzan meets American Pie.

*shivers uncomfortably*

Sarah Whittle was roped into playing this game by Alan and was a witness to this horrifying experience of watching the child being sucked into a board game. She explains to our main characters, after we are reintroduced to the grown version of her, she tried to tell anyone that would listen what happened to Alan, but they all passed her off as a crazy person. She’s been in therapy ever since. That singular event ruined her entire life and mental stability. It probably changed the trajectory of what she pursued in her career as well. She was even taught by her psychiatrist to think this event never happened, trying as hard as possible to block it from her memory. To make herself feel better, she lied to herself, hoping Alan was actually murdered by his father because it would make more sense than being sucked into a magical board game. Are you comprehending this? I’ll repeat it if you weren’t listening:

To make herself feel better, she was actually hoping Alan was murdered by his father because it would make more sense than being sucked into Jumanji.

This depressing characterization is used irresponsibly as a comedic trait, and it doesn’t work. There’s a moment where she calls her psychiatrist after seeing Jumanji in the flesh once again and the clear intention of the scene is supposed to be zany and humorous. Unfortunately, I felt bad for everyone involved, especially Sarah. For some reason, Alan is able to be strong and come to terms with what happened (even though it would be understandable if he didn’t), but Sarah is still broken, despite her being brave enough to rejoin the game. We see this right when we first meet the adult version of her, played wonderfully by Bonnie Hunt by the way. When Alan, Judy, and Peter approach her at her fortune-telling business at her home, she uses a fake name. When they mention the name “Sarah Whittle”, she explains how she doesn’t go by that name anymore, further exemplifying how that one night playing Jumanji affected her. She can’t even open the door fully as she looks at them, frightened as can be. How can you not feel bad for this poor woman? She’s been psychologically scarred just as much as Alan has, minus the threat of death at every corner! There’s one thing when you garner sympathy for a character, but it’s a whole other thing when you feel so bad that you want to give the fourth most important character a hug and a deep conversation where you can tell her, “I believe you”. Trying to make things funny in these situations involving her character doesn’t seem appropriate at all if you actually pay attention and care about the story.

This leads into my next point.

Judy and Peter don’t seem nearly as frightened as they should be, considering the severity of the situations they find themselves in and the potential consequences. They even roll their eyes at one point when Alan and Sarah are arguing for comedic effect but once again, it’s not funny. The conversation is eye-opening for both Alan and Sarah, and I wanted to hear more of it because at that moment in time, their situation is why the story is actually interesting. In addition, I lost almost all the interest I had in the children’s’ story once Alan and Sarah got involved. The kids aren’t developed enough as personalities. As soon as the adults came into the picture, it was hard for me to be emotionally attached to the kids, even though they all had the same goal. Both of their lives have been ruined and these kids are thinking, “Can you guys stop talking? We’re trying to get on with this game”. Do you not understand the horror that Alan must’ve saw in that jungle? Do you not understand the trauma Sarah had to suffer through, along with having to live with being referred to as a psychotic person for most of her life?

Family movie my ass! This is easily PG-13 for its traumatic themes alone. The imagery just adds to it.

The special effects are amazing for the time period and the animatronic stuff is impressive (the lion is a great example), though it can be downright terrifying at times because of how creepy some things can get. This movie produces genuine terror, especially compared to the rest of the franchise.

All things considered, there were some positives coming out of the movie. Robin Williams is a solid adventurer that you can get behind. He plays the broken man very well and carries inklings of the later sadness that would define the second half of his career as an actor. However, I will admit this material would’ve been better suited for someone else to make sense of the tone of the movie. When you cast Williams in a “family movie”, you’re expecting a bit more comedy out of him. In his defense, if you don’t go into Jumanji with that expectation, you’ll realize how good he was in the role. To make sense of the material though, I would’ve made it a dramatic action movie and had it star Michael Douglas, Kevin Costner, or Michael Keaton. That way, no one would feel obligated to shoehorn unwanted comedy into the depressing material given. In terms of being an action-adventure film, Jumanji is very exciting. It’s got some serious edge-of-your-seat action that keeps you on your toes as the film progresses. The monsoon sequence with the crocodiles was awesome, as was the whole idea of Van Pelt. Though considering he’s this scary, big-game hunter, he needed to look a little bit less like Captain Crunch. In other good news, I finally found a role where David Alan Grier isn’t supremely annoying in, so that’s a plus.

The ending is also very good, but it’s mostly because for the first time in the entire movie, you finally feel relieved.

*Question: Why can’t the characters just roll the dice really fast? Before something happens, they have about a minute of downtime. Hypothetically, couldn’t they all roll in rapid fire way, with each character immediately picking up the dice and throwing it down right after the other to keep the pawns moving? As the house starts to get destroyed by whatever is coming next, they could hypothetically buy themselves time and keep rolling until one of them gets to the center of the board to end everything as quickly as possible, right? There’s no card or rule that stops them from doing this. Its just “terror” happens and the next person rolls. I don’t know. It was just something that came to mind.*

This may not really matter in the grand scheme of things, but when Peter was turned into a monkey, he looked more like a small wolf-man. I have to agree with Roger Ebert here. Watch this movie and tell me I’m wrong. I dare you.

People overrated the holy hell out of Jumanji. It’s okay and all, but considering the things that it promises to be, it fails to deliver on all fronts. Also, what happens to these characters beforehand can really stick with you if you’re invested. I’ll say it right now, EVERY sequel in this franchise was better than this original film, including Zathura. They were funnier, better family movies, better casts, and were a lot less depressing. In terms of scariness though (along with pure emotion and excitement), this Jumanji beats them all. The imagination is there, and it still has a lot of entertainment value, but it’s not nearly as good as any of the others. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

Fun Fact: Tom Hanks was the first choice to play Alan Parrish, but he turned it down because he was already tied up with Apollo 13 and Toy Story (two much better choices indeed). Other stars that were considered were Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sean Connery, Harrison Ford, Michael Douglas, Kevin Costner, Michael Keaton, Alec Baldwin, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Kevin Kline, Sean Penn, Richard Dreyfuss, Bryan Cranston, Bill Paxton, and Rupert Everett. Kirstie Alley was considered for Sarah Whittle and a young Scarlett Johansson auditioned for Judy.