Critic Reviews

In the end, the filmmakers have given us one of the most fun movie-going experiences I’ve had this year. Huge kudos go to Johnson, Hart and especially Black for providing some truly entertaining performances for kids of all ages.

It’s an entertaining, engaging, colourful picture in its own right with decently-handled action-adventure set-pieces and sly comedy, detouring from the expected thrills and spills into body-hopping comedy drama.

Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle is both a fulfilling reinvention and adventurous video game quest that’s far funnier, and unexpectedly exciting, than you could hope for from an evolved reboot with explosive fantasy character.

Kasdan injects this all with vigor and breezy humor.

Jumanji: Welcome to The Jungle is the Christmas tentpole release that aims to please and succeeds, a funny family entertainment product that subverts more expectations than it was obligated to contractually.

The Jumanji reboot Welcome to the Jungle is a happy surprise — a movie that turns out to be good (almost clean) fun, and is much more interested in character and comedy than special effects.

The group’s thematically, comedically broad inversion of the source material is consistently entertaining, and squeezes in some nicely played character growth to boot.

The film’s best moments show the characters bonding as teens, “Breakfast Club”-style, within their new bodies.

A tremendous improvement over the tepid 1995 original, this quasi-sequel brings humor, fun performances, and a canny understanding of late 1990s-style video games to a party that never takes itself seriously.

The real fun of “Jumanji” lies in the casting. The towering Johnson and scrappy Hart play especially well off each other.