The Rock is the worst thing about the Jumanji remake

This is a film about body-swapping, but Dwayne Johnson can only ever play himself

'Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.'
(Image credit: Frank Masi/Sony Pictures via AP)

That watching the new Jumanji feels like watching someone else play a video game is fitting, since that's literally what the movie makes you do. The update on the 1995 film transforms the board game into an old video game, and it is your privilege to watch the characters play it. In this version, the four principals — a high school nerd, a football player, a misfit, and a Hot Girl™ — are supposed to remove staples from old magazines in detention. Instead, they plug in the game and choose their avatars. The joke — the long, repeated, endlessly riffed-on joke — is how poorly their avatars match their "real" identities. The nerd becomes Dwayne Johnson, the misfit becomes the hot girl, the hot girl becomes Jack Black, and the football player turns into the Kevin Hart. Get it?

It's not a bad premise, but it's more winky than magical or scary, and it does exactly what you'd expect. This Jumanji is less a movie about getting trapped in a universe whose rules are unknown and more about laughing at people trapped in different bodies. I mean it when I say the movie feels like its metaphor: Watching someone else play a videogame is a pretty, um, vicarious form of fun. Jumanji has great graphics and an exhausting amount of meta-commentary (did you know The Rock has big muscles?); it makes fun of the random incentives and enemies that are de rigueur in video games and make little sense outside them. But the result is so far from immersive that not even the characters stuck there ever quite sink into its world. Bobby Cannavale does what he can to bring some texture to the game's sour and flat insect-loving villain (I half-wished this NPC — that's "non-player character" — would turn out to be controlled by somebody real, just so there could be some real tension). And Rhys Darby brings his customary spark to his role as "Nigel," the peppy guide. But the world, save for some truly terrifying hippos, feels too fake to be anything but mildly amusing.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.