Jumanji

There once was a board game called Jumanji that brought its jungle characters to life, much to the dismay of those playing it. A young boy was one of those unlucky players and he got sucked into the fantasy world of the game. Years later, two other kids find the long forgotten board game, which releases the now grown boy (Robin Williams) from his jungle prison. Unfortunately, they have also started the game in motion again, and it has begun unleashing its jungle characters into the real world.

While the premise is interesting, the movie really isn’t anything special. The biggest problem that this movie faces are its computer generated jungle creatures. Apparently, the animals were supposed to look somewhat stylized, like they might look in a board game, but they end up looking cheap. They look like someone decided to save some money by going with second rate computer animation. It ends up being really distracting in a great many places during the movie. The fact that the computer animated effects are really what the movie is based around leaves the movie in a bad position. Maybe if the plot hadn’t had the sole purpose of moving us from one computer generated effect to the next, Jumanji might have been a little more entertaining. As it turned out, the movie was just one long series of crappy effects with no real story to go with them.