safari guy from jumanji

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Jumanji (1995)

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Alan Parrish

Judy Shepherd

Peter Shepherd

Sarah Whittle

Samuel Alan Parrish / Van Pelt

Nora Shepherd

Carl Bentley

Carol Anne Parrish

Young Sarah

Exterminator

Mrs. Thomas

Billy Jessup

Jim Shepherd

Martha Shepherd

Gun Salesman

Looter (uncredited)

Ice Cream Man (uncredited)

Extra (uncredited)

Townie (uncredited)

Lion / Crocodile (uncredited)

David Willson

Art Direction

Glen W. Pearson

James Hegedus

Mike Kruger

Assistant Property Master

John G. Anderson

Construction Buyer

Charles Leitrants

Construction Coordinator

Dave Conway

Construction Foreman

Michael J. Siver

Marc Greene

James D. Bissell

Production Design

Timothy Burgard

Production Illustrator

Dan Sissons

Property Master

Beth Kushnick

Set Decoration

Cynthia T. Lewis

Tedd Kuchera

Pamela Klamer

Set Designer

Storyboard Artist

Robert Ennis

Additional Camera

Gary J. Williams

Best Boy Grip

Lecily Corbett

Camera Trainee

Thomas E. Ackerman

Director of Photography

Rick Stadder

Andrew D. Wilson

First Assistant Camera

Dave Walker

Norman Buck

Terry McEwen

Second Assistant Camera

Michael Ginsburg

Still Photographer

Pauline Heaton

Underwater Camera

Costume & Makeup

Caroline Cranstoun

Assistant Costume Designer

Beth Mackie

Assistant Makeup Artist

Jane E. Still

Costume Design

Martha Wynne Snetsinger

Tracey Boulton

Costume Supervisor

Derek J. Baskerville

Sherry Linder-Gygli

Key Hair Stylist

Sandy Cooper

Key Makeup Artist

Alec Gillis

Makeup Designer

Bruno Coupe

Set Dressing Artist

Stacey Butterworth

Gerhard Gehrmann

Patti McReynolds

Craft Service

Lawrence Albright

Dorothy Bulac

Makeup Effects

Christine Kaseta Cornelius

Scenic Artist

David Benson

Software Engineer

Alex Burdett

Special Effects Assistant

Tom Blacklock

Special Effects Best Boy

Rory Cutler

Special Effects Coordinator

Steve Davis

Special Effects Technician

Adam Bryant

Betty Thomas Quee

Stunt Coordinator

Melissa R. Stubbs

Stunt Double

Mike Mitchell

Becky Bates

Dawn Stofer-Rupp

Delaina-Lu Gamblin

Lauro Chartrand

Roy T. Anderson

James Straus

Supervising Animator

Transportation Captain

Transportation Coordinator

David Linck

Unit Publicist

Kevin McKenna

Video Assist Operator

Doug Chiang

Visual Effects Art Director

Bill Kimberlin

Visual Effects Editor

Joe Johnston

Betsy Magruder

First Assistant Director

Script Supervisor

Sandra Mayo

Second Assistant Director

Jonathan Schneider

Second Second Assistant Director

Christine Derek

Third Assistant Director

Melinda Friedman

Assistant Editor

Color Timer

Robert Dalva

Bruce Giesbrecht

First Assistant Editor

Negative Cutter

Best Boy Electrician

Les Erskine

Chief Lighting Technician

Electrician

Doug Moreno

Assistant Accountant

Rick Fearon

Assistant Location Manager

Wendy O'Brien

Casting Assistant

Suzy Sharp-Kane

Casting Associate

Executive In Charge Of Production

Larry J. Franco

Executive Producer

Robert W. Cort

James Forsyth

Extras Casting

Dow Griffith

Location Manager

Mandy Butler

Payroll Accountant

Scott Kroopf

William Teitler

Tink Ten Eyck

Production Accountant

Production Assistant

Lisa Van Cott

Production Coordinator

Ian Thompson

Production Driver

Michael Besman

Production Executive

Brent O'Connor

Production Manager

Yvonne Melville

Production Office Coordinator

Marty P. Ewing

Unit Production Manager

Dean Drabin

Hugh Waddell

ADR Supervisor

Christopher Boyes

Assistant Sound Designer

Assistant Sound Editor

Donald D. Brown

Boom Operator

Sara Bolder

Dialogue Editor

Tom Barwick

Foley Artist

Sandina Bailo-Lape

Foley Editor

Tony Eckert

Foley Mixer

Jim Henrikson

Music Editor

Steven Bramson

Orchestrator

James Horner

Conductor, Original Music Composer

Gary Rydstrom

Sound Designer

Ethan van der Ryn

Sound Effects Editor

Frank E. Eulner

Teresa Eckton

Sound Mixer

Richard Hymns

Supervising Sound Editor

Visual Effects

Animation Supervisor

Barbara Brennan

Digital Compositors

Jill Brooks

Visual Effects Coordinator

Mark S. Miller

Visual Effects Producer

Ken Ralston

Visual Effects Supervisor

Stephen L. Price

Chris Van Allsburg

Greg Taylor

Jonathan Hensleigh

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Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle review – fantasy romp likably upgraded for gamer generation

Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Karen Gillan and Kevin Hart have fun in a video-game world in an amiable sequel-by-numbers with a body-swap twist

T he 90s family adventure Jumanji was a fantasy romp about children being whooshed into the universe of a magical board game, where a former kid player played by Robin Williams had grown to adulthood, having been marooned there. The film seemed to be using the grammar and rhetoric of video-gaming, which is about getting from one level to another by not getting killed.

Now it has been upgraded for 2017 in a way that makes the gaming idea explicit, and yet also as quaint and antique as board games might have looked in 1995. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a big, brash, amiable entertainment with something of Indiana Jones, plus the body-swap comedy of Freaky Friday, or F Anstey’s Victorian classic Vice Versa. It features an endearing performance from Dwayne Johnson who, as a teen wimp magicked into a giant Herculean body, has to look nervy and nerdy and say things like “Oi vey”.

As before, there is a slightly cursory introductory sequence, but now it is set in the 90s. A weird-looking board game is discovered on a beach – it contains a game cartridge, a kid tries playing and he is spirited within. Flash forward to the present day, and four high-school teens – Instagram princess Bethany (Madison Iseman), earnest student Spence (Alex Wolff), alienated indie kid Martha (Morgan Turner) and humongous football star Fridge (Ser’Darius Blain) – are in trouble at school for various reasons. As a punishment they are made to clear out an old store room that contains this strange video-game Jumanji. Bored and slightly curious, they plug it in to an old monitor and randomly choose their digital avatars. Spence goes for Dr Smolder Bravestone, Bethany opts for Professor Shelly Oberon, Fridge goes for zoologist Moose Finbar and Martha chooses biologist Ruby Roundhouse.

And then, wham: they are spirited into this Inception-ary world: a vast, threatening jungle landscape. To his chagrin, Fridge finds that his body belongs to a quiveringly diminutive guy, played by querulous, panicky Kevin Hart. Martha finds that she is now a total babe, played by Karen Gillan . Spence finds that he inhabits the body of man-mountain Dwayne Johnson, who rather sweetly impersonates someone who thinks of himself as a seven-stone weakling. But most traumatised is Bethany, who finds that Professor Shelly is a man – a portly, cowardly scientist played by Jack Black. There are amusing scenes in which Shelly must get used to urinating with a penis, and deal with those moments in which one’s penis can give away private emotional turmoil. It’s a nice performance from Black.

Our quirky quartet have to battle huge rhinos, vast hippos, horrible snakes and a sinister baddie to restore a magic jewel to an occult statue. In this way, they will win the game and escape from the world of Jumanji. But they must also find that long-lost castaway player from the 90s, who uses phrases such as “da bomb” and thinks that Cindy Crawford is the epitome of beauty.

It’s a likable film which borrows liberally from everything and everyone, and if it’s put together by numbers, well, then it is done capably enough. There are some nice lines: I liked Ruby airily claiming that microbiology is one of her favourite biologies. Perhaps it is destined to be seen on small screens for sleepovers, but it’s an amiable effort that will go down like eggnog over Christmas.

• Dwayne Johnson (The Rock)
• Karen Gillan
• Action and adventure films
• Science fiction and fantasy films
• Comedy films

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Jumanji cast: Where are they now?

Robin Williams was running from wild animals in the suburbs long before Kevin Hart and Karen Gillan went exploring in the jungle.

Everett Collection; Getty Images

A staple of the video store era, Jumanji is the type of live-action family adventure movie that's hard to come by these days. (Those sequels just don't scratch the same itch.) At the time, director Joe Johnston — who previously directed Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989) with Rick Moranis and The Rocketeer — specialized in this type of PG-rated, scary but not too scary fare. And when he teamed up with Robin Williams , then the biggest comedic star in the world thanks to his roles in Aladdin (1992) and Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), the results were hilariously thrilling and memorable enough to have ‘90s kids asking decades later: Where is the Jumanji cast now?

Robin Williams (Alan Parrish)

Robin Williams came to the Jumanji cast as a huge star. Kids knew Williams as the Genie in Aladdin and Peter Pan in Hook (1991), while their parents remembered him from Mork & Mindy and his stand-up career circa the '70s and '80s. In 1987, he notably starred in Good Morning, Vietnam , in which he played real-life radio DJ Adrian Cronauer. Jumanji was another hit for Williams, and his hot streak continued through the rest of the '90s with starring roles in feel-good movies like Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), Flubber (1997), and Patch Adams (1998).

Around the same time, Williams began exploring more dramatic roles as well. He won an Academy Award for playing supportive therapist Sean in Good Will Hunting (1997), and he received critical acclaim for his dark turn as a dangerously obsessive photo technician in One Hour Photo (2002). Williams continued alternating between family-friendly films and more satirical adult comedies — Death to Smoochy (2002) and World’s Greatest Dad (2009) are two of his edgiest roles — until 2014, when he died by suicide at his home in California.

The news of Williams' death shocked the world, and tributes to him poured in from his many colleagues, friends, and admirers. President Barack Obama issued a statement that read, in part: "Robin Williams was an airman, a doctor, a genie, a nanny, a president, a professor, a bangarang Peter Pan, and everything in between ... He arrived in our lives as an alien — but he ended up touching every element of the human spirit." An area of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park has since been renamed Robin Williams Meadow in his honor.

He is survived by his wife, Susan Schneider, and three children, including Zelda Williams, who has followed in her father's footsteps through show business.

Kirsten Dunst (Judy Shepherd)

Kirsten Dunst is one of a handful of actors who successfully transitioned from child star to full-grown movie star. Judy Shepherd in Jumanji is just one of her iconic roles as a young actress. She had her breakout film the year prior by starring opposite Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in Interview With the Vampire (1994) and as the youngest March sister, Amy, in the 1994 movie version of Little Women .

After Jumanji , Dunst appeared in a recurring role on ER and voiced the kid version of the title character in Anastasia (1997) before making a string of teen-oriented comedies like Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999) and Bring It On (2000) . (One notable exception from that era is her acclaimed performance in the drama The Virgin Suicides , which premiered in 1999.) Her role as Mary Jane Watson in Spider-Man (2002) brought even more fame in the early aughts, followed by more mature work in the 2010s with starring roles in Melancholia (2011) and The Beguiled (2017) — her third collaboration with The Virgin Suicides director Sofia Coppola .

While on the press tour for The Beguiled in 2017, she made a playful swipe at the producers behind Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle , which was released the same year. "I honestly didn't even know they were making a  Jumanji  movie," she told Entertainment Tonight , joking, "I'm offended I haven't been reached out to be in it!"

Dunst is married to actor Jesse Plemons , and they have two children together. The pair often appears as couples onscreen, such as when they met on the set of Fargo season 2 and each received Emmy nods. They later collaborated on Jane Campion 's Oscar-winning film The Power of the Dog (2021), for which they also both earned acting nominations.

Bradley Pierce (Peter Shepherd)

A seasoned child actor, Bradley Pierce had appeared in more than a dozen films before landing the role of the younger Shepherd sibling, Peter, in Jumanji . Much of Pierce's work at that time was voice acting: He played miniature teacup Chip in Beauty and the Beast (1991) when he was 9 years old and voiced Tails on the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon series.

One year after Jumanji, Pierce reunited with his onscreen sister Dunst to play siblings once again in the 1996 TV movie The Siege at Ruby Ridge . From there, he appeared in The Borrowers (1997) and continued doing voice work and one-off TV appearances. However, his depression diagnosis at age 16 caused him to pull back from acting.

Pierce spoke out about his experience with mental illness after Williams' suicide. "I really played it close to the vest until Robin died, actually," he told TMZ . "And then I decided, 'You know what, I'm going to go ahead and try to use his death and the tragedy that it was to open up to people and put it out there,' and so I did."

As an adult, Pierce still appears in the occasional film (he's credited as "additional voices" in 2019's Pokémon: Detective Pikachu ) but his passion is the nightlife business. He owns a consulting firm called Pierce & Luna , which provides bartending education and specialty cocktail recipes for businesses and events around Los Angeles.

He has three children with his ex-wife Shari Holmes.

Bebe Neuwirth (Aunt Nora)

Bebe Neuwirth began her career in show business as a ballerina before breaking out on Broadway in the '80s with roles in A Chorus Line , Sweet Charity , and Chicago. (She won Tonys for her work in the latter two.) She played Dr. Lilith Sternin on Cheers (winning two Emmys) and reprised the part as a recurring guest star on the spinoff series Frasier opposite her TV ex-husband Kelsey Grammer . Neuwirth's notable movie roles include Summer of Sam (1999) and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003).

All the while, she continued to work on Broadway and express herself through dance. (She also appeared as herself in an episode of Will & Grace in 2004.) In addition to a starring role on the Max series Julia , Neuwirth played Lilith once more on the 2023 revival of Frasier on Paramount+, but it wasn't her first time reprising a famous role — she returned to the world of Jumanji as Aunt Nora in the 2019 film Jumanji: The Next Level .

Neuwirth spoke to The New York Times in 2017 about a certain prop she took from the set of the original Jumanji : "I have hippopotamus salt-and-pepper shakers. I don't remember how they fit into the story, but somehow I have them."

She is married to director/writer/producer Chris Calkins.

David Alan Grier (Carl "The Soleman" Bentley)

David Alan Grier is another actor who got his start on Broadway before making the transition to film and TV. He also had experience in comedy before appearing as eccentric inventor Carl in Jumanji . At the time Jumanji was filmed, Grier had just wrapped up a run on the popular series In Living Color . He's also made appearances on other sketch shows like Comedy Bang Bang , A Black Lady Sketch Show , and Crank Yankers .

But Grier is most recognizable as a sitcom star, having led DAG and The Cool Kids . Additionally, he made an impression in the ensemble casts of Martin , The Carmichael Show , and Life With Bonnie , which reunited him with his Jumanji costar Bonnie Hunt . He played Pops Dixon on the Jamie Foxx -led Netflix series Dad Stop Embarrassing Me and appeared in 10 episodes of the Paramount+ series Joe Pickett . His guest-star roles are too numerous to name here but include Saturday Night Live , Pinky and the Brain , Happy Endings , The Cleveland Show , and The Eric Andre Show .

All the while, Grier has maintained his theater roots. In 2015, he notably played the Cowardly Lion in the TV movie musical The Wiz Live and won his first Tony in 2021 for A Soldier's Play . He also had a supporting turn as Reverend Avery in the film version of the musical The Color Purple (2023) .

Grier is a father of one, sharing a daughter, Luisa Danbi Grier-Kim, with his ex-wife Christine Y. Kim. He was previously married to actress Maritza Rivera.

Bonnie Hunt (Sarah Whittle)

A comedic actress known for her warm and relatable screen presence, Chicago native Bonnie Hunt plays Alan Parrish's long-lost love Sarah Whittle as an adult in Jumanji.

"When I read the script, it reminded me a lot of The Wizard of Oz ," Hunt told The Oklahoman of Jumanji . "I was so involved in it; my imagination was going crazy reading it. I thought it'd be nice to be involved in a film that's nice for the whole family to see."

Early in her career, Hunt worked as a nurse while performing improv on the side. That all changed when she nabbed a role in Rain Man (1988) opposite Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman . In the early '90s, Hunt co-created a sitcom called The Building with her friend David Letterman . Although the show was praised by critics, it never took off in the ratings and was canceled after five episodes. Another project, Bonnie , suffered a similar fate. Life With Bonnie fared better and aired on ABC from 2002 to 2004. In 2008, Hunt launched a talk show, The Bonnie Hunt Show , which aired for two seasons in syndication.

She also continued appearing in family flicks, often playing mothers in movies like Beethoven (1992) and Cheaper by the Dozen (2003). Her other notable films include Jerry Maguire (1996) and The Green Mile (1999), but she's probably best known for her voice work in Disney and Pixar movies, lending her talents to A Bug’s Life (1998), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Cars (2006), Toy Story 3 (2010), Zootopia (2016), and their sequels.

Jonathan Hyde (Sam Parrish/Van Pelt)

A former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Australian-English actor Jonathan Hyde plays a dual role as Alan's father, Sam Parrish, and the diabolical big-game hunter Van Pelt in Jumanji . Since then, he's continued to combine his love of Shakespeare (playing Hamlet's uncle Claudius on stage in London in 2021) with film and TV work.

His dignified aura and classical training make Hyde a frequent presence in period pieces. In fact, kids who grew up watching him in Jumanji may also recognize him from other beloved films of that era. He played Herbert Arthur Runcible Cadbury in Richie Rich (1994) Bruce Ismay — the mustachioed manager whose impatience dooms the RMS Titanic — in the 1997 mega-blockbuster Titanic , the ill-fated Warren Westridge in Anaconda (1997), and the greedy British Egyptologist Dr. Allen Chamberlain in The Mummy (1999). Hyde's later credits include main roles on shows like The Strain and Trollhunters: Tales of Arcadia .

He has been married to opera singer Isobel Buchanan since 1980; one of their two daughters is actress Georgia King.

Patricia Clarkson (Carol Parrish)

Columbia TriStar; Getty Images

A New Orleanian who attended the prestigious Yale School of Drama, Patricia Clarkson had yet to find fame when she played the small supporting role of Carol Parrish in Jumanji. Three years later, she broke out in the movie High Art (1998), in which she gave a harrowing performance as an actress struggling with drug addiction. Other notable movie roles from around this time include The Green Mile (1999) and Far From Heaven (2002).

The early-2000s were a busy time for Clarkson. She recurred on the acclaimed HBO series Six Feet Under , an early example of "prestige TV" that earned her two Emmys. She also appeared in a series of celebrated independent films. In 2003, she was in four Sundance showcases: The Baroness and the Pig , The Station Agent , All the Real Girls , and Pieces of April — the latter for which she received an Oscar nomination. Since then, she's done a wide variety of movies and shows, from Shutter Island with Leonardo DiCaprio , to Easy A with Emma Stone , to Sharp Objects with Amy Adams . A well-respected figure in the cinematic community, she served on the jury of the 2023 Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic.

Adam Hann-Byrd (Young Alan)

Everett Collection; Adam Hann-Byrd/X

His role as a young Alan Parrish in Jumanji wasn't Adam Hann-Byrd's biggest achievement as a child actor. That would be Little Man Tate , which he starred in opposite Jodie Foster in 1991. And while Hann-Byrd continued to appear in supporting roles in movies like The Ice Storm and Halloween H20: 20 Years Later throughout the '90s, he never really topped the success of his earlier works.

That's not to say that he has left Hollywood behind. Hann-Byrd has since transitioned into a successful career as a writer for TV and video games. He got in on the ground floor at Hulu as a writer on the satirical series The Morning After from 2012 to 2013. He also worked in the writers' rooms of Fringe and The Librarians in addition to co-writing the games Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery and Signs of the Sojourner .

He recalled his experience working with Robin Williams to The New York Times in 2017. "Robin was such a gentle soul," Hann-Byrd said. "He had this larger-than-life manic persona, but he could turn that off when he wanted to. He was a complicated guy."

Hann-Byrd has been married to his wife, Dara Epstein, since 2017.

Laura Bell Bundy (Young Sarah)

Laura Bell Bundy , the actress who plays a younger version of Sarah Whittle in flashback scenes, was 14 years old when Jumanji hit theaters. It wasn't her first movie role — she had previously appeared in The Adventures of Huck Finn and Life With Mikey , both in 1993 — but it is her most famous. She also portrayed Sweetheart in Dreamgirls (2006) and Becky in five episodes of How I Met Your Mother . Today, however, Bundy is best known as a Broadway star. 

Among her theater credits, Bundy originated the roles of Amber Von Tussle in the musical Hairspray and Elle Woods in Legally Blonde. The latter earned her a Tony nomination for Best Actress, and she continued to play Elle in a touring production. Bundy also made a name for herself on TV — she starred as Dr. Jordan Denby on the sitcom adaptation of Anger Management — and in music. So far, she's recorded six albums as a country singer. Her latest LP, Women of Tomorrow , was released in 2021.

Bundy is married to TV executive Thom Hinkle, with whom she has a son.

Related content:

• Ranking all the Jumanjis in Jumanji
• Jumanji sequel stars explain how the new movie honors Robin Williams' legacy
• World's first Jumanji ride promises 'pitfalls, surprises, and dangers' in the jungle

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Film Review: ‘Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle’

Four teenagers turn into Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, and Karen Gillan in a 'Jumanji' sequel that strands them in a jungle of no fun.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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When “ Jumanji ” came out, in 1995, one’s first impulse was to consign it to the increasingly overstuffed file marked “Junky Cheeseball Robin Williams Movies.” The film’s one true distinction was its jungle beasts. The lions and monkeys and elephants and rhinos and zebras, rampaging through a kitchen, were brought to life through the then-novel miracle of digital imagery; this was two years after “Jurassic Park,” but the technology still felt bold. As an adventure, “Jumanji” was deluxe magical trash, but its creatures, so fearsomely alive, seemed to be part of some brave new menagerie.

“ Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle ” is just trash, with nothing magical about it. A quartet of high-school kids gets sucked into a video-game-console update of the Jumanji board game, landing in the most generic of jungles — and that’s where they stay, except for one detour into the most generic of fake Middle Eastern bazaars. Whatever the rules of this particular game, they remain mostly unexplained and largely beside the point. It’s like watching the lamest Indiana Jones sequel ever imagined, minus Indiana Jones.

In his place, our four heroes morph into video-game avatars played by a tossed salad of movie stars, who don’t generate adventure-comedy chemistry so much as they do loudly clashing styles of showboating. The film’s notion of wit is to have Spencer (Alex Wolff), a stringbean gamer, metamorphose into an explorer-archaeologist played by Dwayne Johnson , who flinches and says “Oy vey!” like the nerd he still is inside. If Johnson, and the film’s script, had truly run with this idea, it might have been funny, but Johnson, for the most part, is just Johnson: too committed to his image to tweak it much.

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One of the other kids is a hulking jock nicknamed “The Refrigerator” (Ser’Darius Blain), and the wears-out-its-welcome-in-10-seconds joke is that he gets turned into a zoologist played by Kevin Hart , thereby losing several feet of height. The other two high schoolers are female, so it may seem odd that one of them, Bethany (Madison Iseman), turns into a cryptographer played by Jack Black , but once you’ve seen Black, in tweedy hunter’s garb and big round spectacles, do his mincing impersonation of a high-school trollop (very Meanest Girl of 2003 ), it no longer seems odd, just vaguely embarrassing. The other girl, Martha (Morgan Turner), becomes Ruby Roundhouse, a commando in a halter top played by the charming Karen Gillan, who winds up playing straight woman to the three walking icons of paycheck shtick.

In “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle,” each of the characters has a trio of bars tattooed on his or her wrist, which means that in the game universe of Jumanji they all get three lives. Jack Black is eaten, in one very quick bite, by a gnashing hippo, and moments later — voilà! — he pops down from the sky. Johnson gets tossed off a cliff, then pops down as well. Hart eats pound cake and explodes (for some reason), and so on. Gillan, in the meantime, does some fight-dancing to Big Mountain’s reggae version of “Baby, I Love Your Way.” Did I mention that the four are trying to wrest a giant glowing emerald from the movie’s bad guy — Bobby Cannavale, with no role to play — so that they can restore it to the forehead of the looming mountain sculpted into a jaguar?

Excitement! Suspense! Childlike innocence! Ingeniously staged action set pieces! These are a few of the things you will not find, anywhere, in “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.” The one performer in the film who establishes his own relaxed rhythm, and stays in it, is Nick Jonas, proving once again that he’s got quick-draw acting chops. The movie has snakes and a crocodile pit and a scorpion slithering out of Bobby Cannavale’s mouth. It’s supposed to be a video-ized board game come to life, but really, it’s just a bored game.

Reviewed at AMC Lincoln Square, New York, Dec. 6, 2017. MPAA Rating: PG. Running time: 119 MIN.

• Production: A Sony Pictures Entertainment release of a Columbia Pictures, Matt Tolmach Productions, Radar Pictures, Seven Bucks Productions prod. Producers: Ted Field, Matt Tolmach, William Tietler, Mike Weber. Executive producers: Dany Garcia, David B. Householter, Jake Kasdan.
• Crew: Director: Jake Kasdan. Screenplay: Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Jeff Pinkner, Scott Rosenberg. Camera (color, widescreen): Gyula Pados. Editors: Steve Edwards, Mark Helfrich.
• With: Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Karen Gillan, Bobby Cannavale, Nick Jonas, Alex Wolff, Madison Iseman, Ser’Darius Blain, Morgan Turner.

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Sam Parrish

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Samuel Alan "Sam" Parrish was the father of Alan Parrish, husband to Carol, a descendant of General Angus Parrish and CEO of Parrish Shoes. He appears in the 1995 film, played by Jonathan Hyde, who also played Van Pelt as a dual performance. Sam is unseen in the animated series, but he is mentioned.

Personality [ ]

Although Sam was a strict and firm man, due to his living class and years at Cliffside's school, he was nevertheless a wise father to Alan, loving him more than anyone else. Yet their relationship was strained because of Alan's inability to stand up to face his fears and his lack of interest in continuing family tradition by entering Cliffside, resulting in a falling out between them on the night Alan went missing.

In the alternate timeline, it was shown that Sam's love for his son was so great that he was willing to abandon everything in hopes of finding him. Alan's reaction to this news showed that he had no idea Sam loved him so much. After returning to 1969, when Alan reconciled with him, Sam took on a noticeably softer tone than he previously had in the movie and appeared to enjoy the idea of talking with Alan "father to son" rather than "man to man."

Sam enjoyed smoking a pipe, especially at work in the factory.

Biography [ ]

Early life [ ].

Sam at work.

Samuel Parrish was born in June 18, 1921, and followed in his family traditions by attending the Cliffside School for boys, feeling that he owed who he was to his years of higher education. As he grew up he inherited finest house in New England, the Parrish Mansion, and took up the Parrish traditional role of CEO at Parrish Shoes, as the fourth generation of Parrish produced quality footwear. Sam eventually met and married Carol and they had one son named Alan. While also living in the finest house in the neighborhood with his family, Sam was also frequently at work managing the Parrish Shoes Factory in Brantford, making the best shoes in New England. Following a run-in with Billy's gang, Sam sent Alan out of the factory before firing Carl Bentley for his prototype shoe damaging the factory machine (unaware it was actually that Alan placed the shoe on the conveyor). That night, Sam attended a party with Carol celebrating Brantford's growing economy as the guest of honor, leaving Alan at home, due to a falling out between them in regards to enrolling him for Cliffside, whether he like it or not.

"JUMANJI" timeline [ ]

Due to Alan's imprisonment within "JUMANJI" , Sam and Carol came home to find their only son missing, thinking that he had ran away from home as a result of their heated arguing. Both parents were clearly devastated at Alan's unexplained disappearance, spending much of their time and money searching for him without success and Sam even ended up losing his faith by having abandoned Parrish Shoes resulting in Brantford's economy collapsing. Sam eventually died and was buried with Carol a few years before Alan returned to the real world thanks to Judy Shepherd and Peter Shepherd playing "JUMANJI" .

Due to the uncertainty of Alan's fate, unpleasant stories began to spread that the boy was murdered by his own parents and his remains hidden in the mansion, especially by Sam. One factor to consider was that the Parrish family were held in high regard in Brantford and got special treatment from the police, otherwise, the entire Mansion would have been torn down in hopes of finding any remains of a body. Even the only witness Sarah Whittle accepted this to be Alan's fate, but he refused to believe the ridiculous stories citing Sam was never the kind of man to do that.

Restored timeline [ ]

Alan and Sam reconcile after he won.

When Alan and Sarah were transported back to 1969, the events created from their gameplay of "JUMANJI" were undone and the immediately picked up where they left off by Sam returning to the mansion to pick up his forgotten speech notes. Overcome with joy by winning "JUMANJI" , Sam was alarmed that Alan immediately reconciled with him (unaware of the previous dramatic alternative lifestyle), but was nevertheless happy that their relationship had been healed and promised they would discuss their situation tomorrow. Before Sam left, Alan told him that he put the shoe on the conveyor belt, not Carl Bentley. Sam reacted calmly and said that he’s glad he took responsibility, then leaves.

Sam is unseen in the Jumanji animated series, but he is referred to. When Alan first arrived in "JUMANJI" 23 years before Judy and Peter found the game, Alan referred to his dad owing the (now closed) Parrish Shoe Company and later paid Trader Slick a large sum of dollars for a boat, which he knew he would have to explain to his dad somehow. He also refers to his dad as taking part in duck hunting season, referencing the Sam Parrish and Van Pelt dual role speculation.

Van Pelt's role in the 1995 film is believed to serve as an allegory for Sam Parrish's lesson about standing to face fears.

• The most obvious clue being the fact that both Van Pelt and Sam Parrish are played by Jonathan Hyde in the film.
• The other clues being when the hunter tells Sarah that he did not shoot her because he is hunting down Alan because Alan released him from the game (as part of the rules).
• It can also be noted that the clue that released the hunter related to the victim feeling like a child; part of the reason why Van Pelt is hunting him down because Alan is not man enough to face him, since Alan is always running away from him, akin to Sam Parrish inciting his son to face his fears.
• At the climax, Alan refuses to run off this time, admitting that even though he's still scared, he no longer finds in his heart to run away from what's he afraid of and instead face it to get it over with. Amazed, Van Pelt acknowledges Alan of finally acting like a real man, followed by Alan returning to 1969 and reconciling with his father to have a man to man talk later.
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Film / Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

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Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a 2017 film, directed by Jake Kasdan and belated sequel to Jumanji (and its Spiritual Successor Zathura ). It stars Dwayne Johnson , Kevin Hart , Jack Black , Karen Gillan , Nick Jonas and Bobby Cannavale .

Four Ordinary High School Students receive detention in the form of cleaning out a basement that has laid untouched since The '90s ; among the detritus they find a vintage gaming console... that plays a not-so-vintage game. Each selects a character, and upon hitting "start", they find themselves Trapped in Another World , playing The Game Come to Life — and not the game they expected , either:

• Weaknesses: None.
• Weaknesses: Cake . Speed. Strength.
• Weaknesses: Endurance.
• Weaknesses: Venom.

Together, the four heroes must recover a mysterious jewel called the "Jaguar's Eye" and return it to its rightful place on a jaguar statue to complete the game before they lose all three of their lives. If that wasn't enough, evil mercenary Russel Van Pelt plans to get the jewel for himself, and if he succeeds before the heroes do, then it's game over.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle provides examples of:

• The Ace : The avatar Smolder Bravestone. His game stats even state that he literally has no weaknesses.
• Spencer, Fridge and Bethany (Martha is elsewhere at the time) realising Alex has been stuck in Jumanji for twenty years, and breaking the news to him.
• The scene of Alex and Bethany opening up to each other and talking about their lives back at home before the final level. At the same time, Spencer and Martha admit their feelings for each other.
• Actionized Sequel : Not that the original was without action, but this one has much more of an adventure focus.
• This is not the first time that a character played by Karen Gillan is put in a situation where the warning is "never blink". Here it's the snake staring contest in the bazaar compared to the Weeping Angels in Doctor Who (" Flesh and Stone " — also taking place in the jungle).
• Bethany says "Class is in session" when Martha is inspired enough to ask her for pointers on how to flirt, alluding to Jack Black's role in School of Rock . This line is also almost the same as a lyric from the climactic song in the same film: "Class is in session"/"Recess is in session".
• Tim Matheson's casting as Old Man Vreeke might be a nod to his role in the TV movie of Sometimes They Come Back .
• Adam Westing : Dr. Bravestone seems to have been written specifically for Dwayne Johnson; he's fast, he's strong, he's famous around the world for his adventures, and he has "Smoldering Intensity" listed as an actual Skill he possesses. Meanwhile, his Weaknesses are listed as "None".
• Adventures in Comaland : When they first get sucked into the game, Bethany suggests that the video game system electrocuted all of them and that everybody was sharing the same coma dream to explain what's really happening. Martha quickly lampshades the absurdity of the theory. Martha: Together? We're all in a coma together?
• The real-world group are the typical cast of a High School comedy.
• The characters of Jumanji are typical cast of an action film.
• The Jumanji video game is a parody of an action RPG, complete with cutscenes, Non Player Characters , and a Golden Ending .
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg : While not exactly begging, when Van Pelt corners the team the first time and demands the jewel, Spencer tells him they just want to go home. Van Pelt is sticking to the script though.
• Alliterative Name : Ruby Roundhouse and Franklin "Mouse" Finbar.
• All-Stereotype Cast : Invoked and then yanked out and stuffed in the wrong sockets. The cast of your standard High School comedy are transformed into the heroes of a standard action movie — as the opposite characters. Hilarity Ensues .
• Anachronism Stew : Mostly, the video game and console. It seems like a mix of tropes and styles of different generations of console mixed together.
• Angry, Angry Hippos : Bethany's first death in the game consists of a hippo emerging from the river behind her and eating her alive right in front of her friends. This is in-universe Artistic License – Biology : real hippos, while known to be territorial and dangerous, are strictly herbivorous.
• Animal Stampede : It wouldn't be a Jumanji movie without one. This time, it's a horde of man-eating rhinos chasing the heroes through a canyon.
• Apologetic Attacker : Spencer/Dr. Bravestone, due to a combination of being the strongest character in the game, but at heart still an awkward nerd.
• Shortly before being dropped off by Nigel, Bethany tells Martha she has reason to be upset because she split up with Noah, ended up in the body of a man, and cannot find her phone.
• The first four deaths we see in the game. Bethany is eaten by a hippo, Martha is shot, Spencer is pushed off a cliff by Fridge, and Fridge... eats a piece of cake (which causes him to explode).
• Spencer deduces that the teens could probably die for real in Jumanji if they lose all their lives. Fridge isn't happy to hear the "might" part and asks why Spencer, a video game expert, doesn't know for certain. Spencer has to point out he's never been stuck in a video game and has to make educated guesses.
• Alex doesn't react well when he learns that he's been in the game for twenty years, and that he's known as the "kid who disappeared."
• The mark "Alan Parrish was here" notifies the kids that other people have gotten trapped in the game over the years.
• Ascended to Carnivorism : While rhinos and hippos are very dangerous and deadly animals, they are herbivores. In the game world of Jumanji, both of them eat humans. Although hippos have been known to eat impalas, so it's not entirely implausible. May also be an in-universe example on the part of the former, seeing as the rhinos in the original film never showed any apparent interest in eating anyone (even if they still caused a lot of destruction). It's also an Informed Attribute for the rhinos, as they kill Fridge by trampling rather than eating him.
• As You Know : "As you know better than anyone" appears in an expository letter given to Spencer/Bravestone by Nigel.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny! : Spencer has a moment of this after Martha's first death. He starts explaining that the tattoos on their wrists represents the amount of lives they have left, and gets distracted by his avatar's huge arms before Fridge gets him back on track.
• Audience Shift : The first film is rated PG and skewed towards a younger set, given that the main story is directly lifted from the children's storybook. This sequel, however, aims a little higher with older protagonists and a well-earned PG-13 rating. Despite this, it is not Darker and Edgier , as it is outwardly comedic in tone and is more than happy to hang a few lampshades alongside the perilous scenes.
• Awesome McCoolname : Subverted with Franklin "Moose" Finbar. Fridge even says when selecting his character that he sounds like a badass. Then it turns out the nickname is actually "Mouse" , and if you look carefully when he selects the character, the second "o" is actually a highly stylized "u".
• Back from the Dead : Every single one of the main protagonists are resurrected, which is justified due to the realm of Jumanji following video game logic, meaning the avatars have three lives each. Bethany only dies once, however, due to transferring one of her lives to a dying Alex Vreeke.
• Several of Van Pelt's henchmen.
• Spencer at the end, when he steals one of the motorbikes and uses it to get to the top of the jaguar statue to put the jewel back in it.
• Baffled by Own Biology : While Bethany is in the game avatar of Dr. Sheldon Oberon, she doesn't even realize she's having a... situation .... around Alex until Fridge points it out to her. Bethany: (looks down) Oh my god, these things are crazy!
• Bag of Holding : Fridge/Mouse's backpack, which holds weapons (like Bravestone's boomerang) and tools much larger than the backpack should be able to hold, such as a comically large pair of bolt cutters.
• Bait-and-Switch : The game's second level calls itself "The Mighty Roar", and due to Jumanji's jungle motif, one would assume that it's going to send out a lion or other predator at the players. Then it turns out that said roar is coming from the motorcycles of a biker gang. Fridge: What is this game?!
• Bare Midriffs Are Feminine : Ruby Roundhouse, the only female avatar, wears a small, midriff-exposing halter top. Martha Kaply, the girl who chose her, would never think of wearing anything similar and mentions how impractical such an outfit is in the jungle. By comparison, the three male avatars all wear full shirts (though Bravestone's is sleeveless ).
• Van Pelt has control over the animals of Jumanji, although it seems to be limited in range and not an absolute.
• Fridge discovers that his zoology skills actually give him limited control over an elephant , especially when carrying the jewel .
• Beauty Breeds Laziness : Discussed and downplayed with Bethany and Martha , when Bethany is sitting around trying to get reception for her phone when she is supposed to be helping the other three in detention. While Spencer and Fridge are fine with Bethany sitting things out, she doesn't actively flirt with them. Punished when she gets sucked into the Jumanji game as "an overweight middle-aged man" and has to help in order to survive.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished : The other avatars get dirty and sweaty throughout the adventure, but Ruby always looks untouched, whether she's been in a fight or dragged behind a motorcycle .
• Belly-Scraping Flight : The helicopter clips several trees on its way to the canyon, scrapes the canyon's floor when it initially descends into it, and finally has this trope actively imposed upon it by the rhinos, who jab upwards to tag its undercarriage repeatedly with their horns.
• Berserk Button : Fridge does not take kindly to Spencer calling him a dumbass. At all. He pushes Spencer off a ledge for it, costing Spencer one of his lives.
• Better than a Bare Bulb : A major source of comedy here. The film takes a sledgehammer to the typical stereotypes and narrative tropes associated with both action-adventure games and high school comedies and leaves little unscathed, but it's all in great fun.
• Beware the Quiet Ones : Martha is a timid pushover in the real world, but falls into the role of Fiery Redhead "killer of men" with enthusiasm.
• Big Bad : Russell Van Pelt.
• When Van Pelt and his mooks have the four pinned down at the bazaar, Alex launches a smoke bomb and comes to their rescue, getting them out of there safely.
• In the climax, Van Pelt has a gun to Bethany's head and demands the jewel from Spencer who protests that he doesn't have it. Suddenly, Fridge rides in on an elephant that takes out all the jaguars and distracts Van Pelt long enough to for Bethany to free herself .
• Big Damn Kiss : Parodied. When Spencer and Martha proclaim their love to each other in the game, their avatars kiss, but because of their inexperience, it's the most clumsy and unpleasant-looking kiss of all time. It's played straight later when they kiss in real life.
• When Bethany looks at her reflection to see Professor Shelly Oberon, an overweight middle-aged man. Extra points for Jack Black and Madison Iseman both screaming at once.
• Bethany again when Fridge kills Spencer by pushing him off a cliff.
• Martha, when Spencer loses his second life to a jaguar .
• Fridge when Spencer is sucked into the game console.
• Fridge again after Bethany is attacked and eaten by a hippo in the first level.
• A variant; this time with Fridge exclaiming "Oh, my goodness!" when the group narrowly avoids the arrow trap in the tunnels.
• Fridge again just before the albino rhinos trample him to death.
• Spencer when Fridge tells him Martha is obviously crushing on him.
• Spencer, Martha, and Alex when Fridge tells them he accidentally dropped the jewel out of the helicopter.
• Big Word Shout : Nigel tells the group that "they must save Jumanji and call out its name". Bethany remembers this and urges the others to do it after initially forgetting they have to. Cue them all yelling "JUMANJI!"
• Bethany when Spencer puts the Jaguar's Eye back into the statue after Martha gets it to him .
• Fridge does five in a row when the group gets out of Jumanji and he sees he's back in his real body .
• Bishie Sparkle : Referenced when Bethany is teaching Martha how to flirt so the team can pass the Transportation Shed level: Bethany: Eyes big. Now sparkle. Martha: Sparkle? Bethany: Like an anime character. Now sparkle.
• Bittersweet Ending : Invoked. Everyone gets out of the game and beats it, complete with a Golden Ending . Fridge is still kicked off the football team, however, though he gains more confidence in his intellectual abilities. But this means when Alex returns to when he played the game, thus undoing the bad timeline for his family, he's a married man and a father by the time he sees the kids in present 2016. This also means he and Bethany can't be a couple due to the age difference and No Yay potential, which she sadly accepts, though she is touched that he named his daughter after her .
• Black Dude Dies First : Inverted. Fridge is the sole black character in the foursome (in real life and in the game), yet he is the last of them to lose his first life (after accidentally eating cake). The first one of the group to die is Bethany... who is played by Jack Black . However, of the four, Fridge is the first to lose his second life.
• Black Is Bigger in Bed : Despite his avatar being about two feet shorter than him (by his own admission), Fridge is relieved to see that he is still the same size in the trouser department.
• Bloodless Carnage : The main characters' avatars, and several NPCs , die onscreen, but the only blood you'll see is during Ruby Roundhouse's deaths, when she explodes into a few vaguely blood-like droplets. Though this could be considered a relatively accurate representation of deaths in early '90s video games.
• The story begins with a teenager giving Jumanji no respect since it's just a board game. The story ends with teenagers repaying Jumanji for all the trouble it put them through by dropping a bowling ball on it.
• Spencer and Fridge pass the old and decrepit Vreeke house on the way to school at the beginning and see Alex's bitter father there. At the end, the group see the house again, which never fell into disrepair and is now decorated for Christmas. Alex's father is still there, but is now a grandfather, as Alex returned to the real world and became a father .
• The Breakfast Plot : The four main characters, and how they are brought together, are very reminiscent of The Breakfast Club . Spencer is a nerd, Fridge is a Jerk Jock , Bethany is a Phoneaholic Teenager with traces of the Alpha Bitch , and Martha is a Shrinking Violet . They all knew of each other before, but only Spencer and Fridge knew each other personally, and they all end up meeting doing the same detention. They're then forced to work together, first in the detention and then in Jumanji, if they are to get out of the game alive. The Breakfast Club is further referenced with the principal telling the four that they should think about who they are and who they want to be, much like Vernon does, and tells them that if they don't finish removing the magazine staples for their detention in one day, they have to come back on Saturday (the day The Breakfast Club takes place on). For a further reference, the surname Johnson appears as that of a main character in each film: Brian in The Breakfast Club , Fridge in this film.
• During detention, Fridge asks why the school needs a bowling ball. He later uses that bowling ball to destroy Jumanji .
• During the game, Fridge's weakness to cake. It's mentioned once before the second level and doesn't come into play again until the middle of the third level.
• After the peeing scene, Spencer warns the others to be careful, as he doesn't want anyone to twist an ankle. Later, as Martha is attempting the Supermodel Strut Bethany taught her, Fridge remarks that it looks like Martha twisted her ankle.
• Nigel repeats to the players at the beginning of the game " if you wish to leave the game, you must save Jumanji, and call out its name ." All of them dismiss this due to Nigel's expositional repetition. So when they actually save Jumanji, they initially forget they have to call out its name until Bethany remembers the rhyme .
• Bugs Herald Evil : Van Pelt controls all wildlife on the island because of he stole the jewel of Jumanji. The first thing he does with his newfound power? Take all the bugs in his vicinity into his body. At one point he kills one of his men with a scorpion which crawled out of his mouth.
• Bullying a Dragon : Fridge/Mouse decides that shoving someone with the physique and strength of Dwayne Johnson off of a cliff just to be a dick in retaliation for being called a name, in a game where characters can respawn twice before being Killed Off for Real , is a good idea. Spencer/Bravestone stares him down with a Death Glare ... and gently reminds Fridge that he will push back if it happens again. Unfazed, however, Fridge tries to shove Spencer again, to no avail, then slaps him across the face. Spencer takes the slap with a bored look, punches Fridge into the wall next to them with barely any effort, holds him over the edge of the cliff that Fridge had pushed Spencer off of moments earlier, then hauls him back in and says that wasting lives is no option and that they need each other in order to get out of the game.
• Mouse is frequently abused and put in bad situations. He's also the only avatar to have more than one weakness, and has the least number of strengths.
• Dr. Oberon isn't much better, as he is the first to get killed in both films, despite having different players each time. In The Next Level , he gains a weakness to sun and sand in the desert-based game.
• The fact that Fridge mans both of these characters at different points means he qualifies as well, with the added insult to injury of being an athlete in real life while generally being a weakling in the game.
• Calling Your Attacks : Spencer does this while playing Street Fighter V . He later does the same thing when fighting as Bravestone.
• The Cameo : An uncredited Tim Matheson and Colin Hanks as Old Man Vreeke and Adult Alex respectively.
• During the "Mighty Roar" level: Spencer: Those guys have huge guns! Fridge: Oh, really? Is that what those are, Spencer?
• It happens again, with Bethany this time, during the third level. Mistakenly believing it's a staring contest, she volunteers herself. At the end of the level, after Fridge defangs the snake, Bethany says, "I guess it wasn't a staring contest."
• Chairman of the Brawl : At one point while Martha is attacking the two guards outside the transportation shed, she picks up a wooden chair and whacks one of the guards with it, knocking him down and breaking the chair apart.
• Spencer is not a natural leader, but as Bravestone, he learns to not be such a pushover and be more assertive.
• Fridge is an athlete who fears that being a poor student will get him kicked off the football team which is the only thing he feels he is good at. Therefore, he takes advantage of his childhood friendship with Spencer to get him to do his homework for him. As Finbar, the smallest and weakest character in the game, he comes to learn that he doesn't have to be the biggest and strongest, but figures out how to apply what he is good at to new situations. He also learns a strong lesson in the value of supporting his friends.
• Martha is averse to being social or outgoing, and mocks her teacher at the prospect of physical education. As Ruby, she learns to enjoy new experiences and put herself out there, and that being comfortable with your body is fun and empowering.
• Bethany is self-centered and obsessed with social media and appearances, but as Shelly, she learns to take others into account and live off the grid for a while.
• Chekhov's Gag : Spencer's Crazy-Prepared paranoia about life. When Alex nearly dies from a mosquito bite, Spencer is the only one who knows how to do CPR, which ends up saving Alex due to the game allowing Bethany to transfer a life to him.
• Subverted with the missing piece of the map. Alex turns out to be the missing piece of the team, but the actual missing piece of the map is never found nor does it impact the heroes' ability to complete the game .
• It is revealed that when a character dies with the jewel, they re-spawn with the jewel still in their possession. Martha/Ruby exploits this game mechanism by deliberately allowing herself to be killed while holding the jewel so that she can get it away from the Big Bad and bring it to Spencer/Bravestone when she respawns .
• Martha/Ruby's weakness to venom, which allows her to pull a Heroic Sacrifice .
• Played straight when Fridge questions why a bowling ball is present in the basement they are tasked to clean. He finds a use for it at the end of the movie. As in, he uses it to smash the Jumanji console.
• Mosquitoes. One bites Martha right before she asks why she's wearing her Fanservice outfit soon after arriving in Jumanji. Another one bites Spencer later on in the game, shortly before the characters find out their strengths and weaknesses. These turn out to be Alex's weakness, and after one bites him later, he nearly dies .
• Many of Van Pelt's henchmen use motorbikes to pursue the characters in some of the levels, and in the climax, Spencer commandeers one and uses it to ride to the top of the jaguar statue so he can put the jewel back in .
• The elephant statue that appears in the final level of the game is seen earlier during the cutscene Nigel narrates. When it appears again, Spencer starts climbing as instructed to earlier, only to lose his second life when he falls out of the tree upon being startled by a squirrel, and a jaguar attacks him .
• Spencer's fear of squirrels .
• Elephants. When they discover the elephant piece in the snake basket at the bazaar, they are told to climb upon seeing an elephant, which Spencer does towards the end when the group finds the elephant statue, but it costs him one of his lives when he falls after seeing a squirrel and attacked by a jaguar. Fridge later tames an actual elephant and uses it in a Big Damn Heroes moment.
• Chekhov's Gunman : When the four teens begin the game, they're unable to select one of the five provided character profiles. This comes up later when it's revealed that the fifth character is Alex, who took that slot back in 1996, and he's still in the game playing .
• Chekhov M.I.A. : Alex gets sucked into the game in 1996, and joins Spencer, Fridge, Martha, and Bethany at the bazaar when he saves them from Van Pelt, becoming the group's fifth member.
• Chekhov's Skill : Fridge's skill in football comes in very handy in "The Defenders" level when he comes up with a plan to get around the trap of the torch-lit path leading to the jaguar statue .
• Combat Pragmatist : In the climax, Van Pelt has a gun held to Bethany's head, but after Fridge causes a Big Damn Heroes moment, Bethany gets out of Van Pelt's grip by biting his hand.
• Company Cross References : Several references to Sony products appear throughout the film. For example, Spencer plays Street Fighter V on a PlayStation 4 and has posters of Uncharted 4: A Thief's End and The Last Guardian in his room, both of which are PlayStation exclusives. Bethany's phone is also Sony-branded, probably an Xperia.
• The opening sequence directly sets up that the film is a sequel to the 1995 film, with the board game (in 1996) transforming itself into a video game cartridge to catch the attention of a teenager who dismisses it for his home console.
• The elephant token in the snake basket is Alan's game token from the first movie, as Alan Parrish himself said: Alan Parrish: The elephant was mine. You're playing the game I started in 1969. I'm gonna have to play.
• Alex being stuck in Jumanji for 20 years and not knowing of the current year is similar to Alan, who was stuck in Jumanji for 26 years, and they both have a moment of emotional breakdown.
• Spencer, Bethany, Fridge, and Martha needing their missing piece in order to continue the game, which is similar to how Alan, Peter, and Judy needed Sarah to continue theirs.
• The Big Bad is Van Pelt, just like the original film. Just as the game updated itself to draw in new victims, it updated Van Pelt from hunter to mercenary .
• The players are sucked into the game in a similar effect to how Alan was, and when they return it's also similar.
• The tree house the cast takes refuge in was built by Alan Parrish .
• Alex remarks that while trying to complete the canyon level, he was shot down by a plane being flown by monkeys and lost his second life. In the original film, the monkeys drove cars and motorcycles .
• Before the crew is told to seek a past player, they get an elephant statue — the game piece chosen in the original movie by Alan, who was also sucked into the game years prior.
• The Jaguar's Eye jewel is an enormous green gemstone, not unlike the green orb in the center of the original board game. And just like that game, the players win by getting to the end of the path and shouting "Jumanji!"
• Upon shouting "Jumanji!", the Jaguar's Eye emits a massive, dome-shaped surge of green energy. The camera quickly zooms out, revealing that for that short moment, the dome of energy, along with the winding path that the players took to the giant jaguar statue, resembles the board game's original layout.
• Alex returns to his own time upon the game being finished, creating a new timeline where he never disappeared, just like Alan did.
• Contractual Genre Blindness : While Van Pelt has the power to take the stone by force, he's limited by the game to demand it.
• Cool Shades : Alex dons them during his Let's Get Dangerous! moment. He then loses them via a Glasses Pull when the helicopter is damaged.
• Coquettish Lip Biting : Discussed and subverted, to hilarious effect. When Bethany teaches Martha to flirt in order to get past the guards, this becomes part of her training. But with Bethany stuck in Dr. Shelly's body and Martha being an awkward nerd who isn't actually attracted to the guards, they both just end up looking ridiculous. Bethany: A nibble goes a long way, girlfriend.
• Cosmic Retcon : Finishing the game and freeing Alex returns him to 1996, and he lives to the present day to meet the four teens as an adult with a family.
• Cowardly Lion : Spencer. He starts off as a socially awkward nerd who gets spooked very easily. Even when he ends up in the body of Smolder Bravestone and gets a Heroic Build , Super-Strength , Super-Speed , and Super-Reflexes , he is still a Lovable Coward and his first reaction to danger is usually to start running. Part of his Character Development is learning to be braver than he originally was, which he eventually does.
• CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable : Played with. Alex gets stung by a mosquito, his weakness, and begins dying. Bethany begins administering CPR in a desperate life-saving attempt, but she only has a vague idea of the proper technique, and she's clearly doing it wrong. It works anyway, because attempting CPR at all transfers one of her extra lives to Alex . The situation wasn't one that would require CPR in the first place, but all the characters are panicking teens, and it's a video game anyway.
• Creepy Shadowed Undereyes : The skin beneath Van Pelt's eyes is shadowed, making him look like he's dying. A flashback shows that he didn't have them before stealing the Jaguar's Eye.
• Cue the Falling Object : After Martha/Ruby Roundhouse kicks the ass of the two guards of the transportation shed and confidently walks away, their sun shelter, damaged in the fight, crashes down behind her.
• Curb-Stomp Battle : Spencer/Dr. Bravestone versus the mooks in the bazaar. From the moment it begins he's in complete control of the fight.
• Curse Cut Short : Fridge is in the middle of a loud "SHI—" when he is sucked into the game.
• Played with. In the climax, Van Pelt has Bethany at his mercy, with a gun to her head. However, she is still in the body of a man at this point.
• Martha gets a moment in the final level, when, while fighting off the henchmen in the final level, she ends up being dragged behind a motorcycle by her ankle and unable to do anything about it until Spencer comes to her rescue.
• Damsel out of Distress : While Martha is fighting the guards at the transportation shed, Spencer runs out to assist her. Mere feet from the door, he stops and stares at her kicking the guys' butts all over the place before giving a "yeah, she's got this" nod and heading back inside.
• Dance Battler : Played with. Ruby is listed as this, but her actual fighting style is more like fighting while music plays rather than combining dancing and fighting.
• Darker and Edgier : This film is heavy on action, peril, and violence compared to the lighthearted PG-rated original (as well as the children's book that the films are based upon). There's also a fair amount of swearing.
• Dark Is Evil : Van Pelt. He is the Big Bad , dresses in dark clothing, always seem to be seen in shadow, and has a black vulture as a Non-Human Sidekick .
• Deader than Dead : The avatars each have three lives, and can regenerate twice throughout the game. If they lose their third life, however, they're dead for real. This almost happens to Alex Vreeke, but Bethany transfers her second life to him to prevent that from happening.
• Dead Hat Shot : After Bethany is chomped on by the Hippo and dragged into the river, all that remains is Shelly's hat, floating on the water. Since they're in a video game, though, she respawns.
• Deadpan Snarker : Martha and Fridge. Sometimes Spencer and Bethany have their moments, too.
• Death as Game Mechanic : Players who lose a life while inside the Jumanji game world drop from the sky when they respawn. Martha exploits this to hand off the MacGuffin to Spencer on her way down.
• Death Glare : Spencer gives Fridge one of these after Fridge pushed him off a cliff. Understandable, he had just cost Spencer one of his lives.
• Deliberate Injury Gambit : In the climax, Ruby deliberately allows herself to die from a snake bite because she'll respawn in the sky while still holding the jewel, allowing her to hand it off to Spencer at the top of the statue while in freefall .
• Did Not Get the Girl : Or Guy, in this case. Bethany takes a shine to Alex, but when the game is over, Alex ends up being sent back to 1996. By the time the teens encounter him again, he's in his mid-adulthood, and a father. As an acceptable consolation, he named his daughter after Bethany , since she saved his life after the near-death mosquito experience.
• Disability Superpower : Of the mundane variety. After being separated from her phone, Bethany finds herself being a lot more open with people, particularly Alex. She says it's like her other senses being heightened.
• Disney Villain Death : Generally Inverted. Whenever an avatar dies and then respawns, they fall out of the sky toward the ground and land uninjured (even though they don't stick the landing the first few times). However, it's played straight with Spencer's first death when he's pushed off a cliff. (Perhaps the game considered that one to be a Bottomless Pit .)
• Disproportionate Retribution : Spencer calls Fridge a dumbass after the second level. Fridge doesn't like this, so he pushes Spencer off a cliff . Spencer respawns moments later, and Fridge knew this would happen, but it's still pretty excessive — not to mention wasting one of Spencer's lives. Everyone calls Fridge out for this.
• Distracted by My Own Sexy : The first thing Fridge does in Mouse's body is check the size of his penis.
• Bethany tells Martha (as Ruby) to do this in order for the rest of the party to sneak into the transportation shed. She fails spectacularly, but it does stall for time, and when a radio suddenly turns on, it allows Ruby's special strength of "dance fighting" to kick in and she easily overpowers the guards.
• Dr. Bravestone has "smoldering intensity" as one of his "Strengths". He doesn't appear to have full control over when he "smolders" but it clearly has an effect on Bethany when he does. However, it's never used to resolve any of the challenges or encounters they have during the game.
• Does This Remind You of Anything? : Nigel begged Van Pelt to put the jewel back where he found it after stealing it from the jaguar statue, but "once he had it in his grasp, he could never let it go". Sounds a lot like alcoholism or drug addiction, especially since Van Pelt is implied to be Drunk On Power .
• Ear Ache : When Spencer is reluctant to jump down the waterfall to escape the motorcycle henchmen, Fridge, who is on his back, twists his ear and causes him to lose balance.
• Eating the Eye Candy : Bethany and Martha both do this to Spencer-in-Bravestone's-body . Bethany also gives Alex a long look up and down after first meeting him, to the point that it makes the latter visibly uncomfortable.
• Empty Piles of Clothing : After Fridge is transported out of Jumanji, Mouse's backpack is left behind. When Spencer picks it up, it's completely empty, presumably because it's only Mouse who can retrieve items from it.
• The End... Or Is It? : Despite Fridge smashing the Jumanji console with a bowling ball, the drums after the credits suggest that Jumanji is still out there.
• Alex has two. He first dismisses Jumanji's board game form so he can continue playing Twisted Metal in his room by himself, while claiming no one plays board games any more. He later saves the others at the bazaar and effortlessly guides them through the traps in the sewers.
• Spencer is introduced playing Street Fighter V in his room, narrating every attack he makes , finishing off Fridge's homework, awkwardly asking Fridge if he wants to hang out that weekend and being startled by a squirrel by the Vreeke house. He's a hardcore gamer who's intelligent but lonely , easily startled and a bit of a doormat (at first).
• Bethany stages a waking up selfie for her Instagram page, makes a video call during a quiz in class (after finishing it), complains about having no reception during detention and refuses to help the others because "she's too pretty". She's a vain Phoneaholic Teenager with Skewed Priorities , but is also more intelligent than she first appears.
• Fridge has Spencer do his homework for him, tells his mother that Spencer has been tutoring him to get his grades up, mocks him for wearing a raincoat when it's not raining, and refuses Spencer's offer to hang out that weekend before hitching a ride to school with a girl, ditching Spencer in the process. Despite the fact he has known Spencer since the seventh grade, they used to be friends but now Fridge basically uses Spencer for his own ends because he feels football is the only thing he's good at (as he himself says later in the movie). He's an arrogant Jerk Jock who is secretly insecure about his intelligence.
• Martha is first seen refusing to participate in gym class before listing the reasons why she thinks it's pointless (getting Spencer's admiration) and sarcastically calls Bethany out for not helping the others during detention. She's a judgemental loner who isn't afraid to say what's on her mind despite (by her own admission) not being good at talking to others.
• Jumanji itself also gets one. When Alex dismisses its original board game format so he can carry on playing his video game, it transforms itself into a video game so that Alex will get sucked into it when he decides to play it, establishing how enticing and dangerous it is.
• Everyone Can See It : Fridge casually tells Spencer that Martha is very obviously interested in him and mocks him for not noticing.
• Everything Trying to Kill You : Not quite as excessive as the first movie, which spawns perils with each turn, but the world inside Jumanji is just as dangerous. Not minutes after arriving in Jumanji, Bethany ends up eaten by a hippo of all things just from standing near the lake. Alongside wildlife, our heroes likewise have to contend with mercenaries and booby traps as well. There's also the fact that their avatars have weaknesses as well, which, if they have some very direct one such as cake or venom, will kill them in one hit. This ends up especially sucking for poor Alex because his weakness is mosquitoes. And since he's in a jungle setting, it's not hard to see why he would be a little paranoid. Indeed, he nearly loses his last life when one manages to bite him.

• Exact Words : Spencer's Wham Line to Van Pelt. He can't give Van Pelt the jewel, because he doesn't have it on his person. Fridge does.
• Face–Heel Turn : Van Pelt used to be Bravestone's partner before they became enemies when Van Pelt stole the Jaguar's Eye.
• Falling into the Plot : In-universe, this is how the Jumanji video game starts — all the players drop down from the sky and land in a field in the middle of the jungle. We see this happen from Spencer's point-of-view.
• Feathered Fiend : A vulture becomes Van Pelt's pet and scout.
• Fire-Forged Friends : Spencer and Fridge had been drifting apart as friends in high school. Martha was a loner, while Bethany was in the popular, selfish crowd. After the events of the game, they are shown growing into their own social group, to the confusion of their classmates.
• Fisher Kingdom : The four protagonists become the Awesome McCoolname avatars they chose when starting up the game. Obviously, hi-jinks ensue — none of the avatars are remotely like the players who selected them. This was likely purposeful; "A game for those to seek to find a way to leave their world behind."
• Five-Second Foreshadowing : In order to escape the mercenaries shooting at them, Martha realizes they need to jump into the water below. She charges off the cliff yelling "Jump" but, as soon as she clears the edge, you hear her give a shriek of pain and she's the only one who tumbles head over heels into the water. When they reach the shore, it's revealed that she's been shot.
• Flat Character : The NPCs , including the main antagonist. Not only do they have limited range of conversation , their backstories or motivations are never expounded on.
• Foul First Drink : While at Alex's treehouse, Spencer and Martha eagerly try the margaritas Alex made since they're technically old enough to drink alcohol while trapped in Jumanji, but after one sip, they decide not to finish them.
• Alex's father warns Spencer that "this world swallows up kids like you", referring to how his son disappeared, and hints at Spencer, Fridge, Martha, and Bethany getting sucked into Jumanji.
• If you look closely in some shots, you can see that the school's mascot is a jaguar. In Jumanji, the objective is to get the Jaguar's Eye gemstone to the statue of the same name and in the final level, in order to get to said statue, they have to deal with actual jaguars .
• When the group is sitting in the principal's office after being given detention, they are sitting in a row of five chairs, with an empty chair between Spencer and Fridge. Spencer and Fridge later have a big falling-out, with Fridge killing Spencer in a moment of rage and Spencer costing one of Fridge's lives in a Heroic Sacrifice . It also sets up how the group will later be joined by a fifth member, in the form of Alex.
• When Bethany respawns after being eaten alive by a hippo, she mistakenly calls it a rhino before Fridge corrects her (thanks to his avatar’s zoology expertise). The group have to deal with a rhino stampede after stealing the helicopter from the transportation shed.
• Spencer says he thinks they have to save Jumanji if they want to get out of the game , and Martha gives him an awed look. Later, it's revealed she has a crush on him.
• The boy at the bazaar tells the characters that "The missing piece is not what you think." It turns out not to be the missing piece of the map, but the fifth player, Alex, who was already inside the game and who saves them from Van Pelt's men not long after this.
• Spencer has repeatedly used the metaphor "spreading like wildfire" in several of his papers, including ones he wrote for Fridge, which is how Fridge's history teacher realized that Spencer was helping Fridge cheat. In the climax, he traps several jaguars with a flamethrower so they can't come after him.
• When the characters are selecting their avatars, Fridge finds that he can't select Seaplane McDonough . This is because his character was chosen by Alex in 1996, and he's still stuck in the game trying to get out, so his character is still in use.
• At the bazaar, Spencer catches the black mamba before it can bite Martha. In the climax, after the jewel goes flying, Martha has to walk through a pit filled with snakes to retrieve it, and this time, she makes use of her weakness to venom by forcing a snake to bite her, causing her to die and respawn with the jewel out of the Big Bad 's reach.
• The message in the third level instructing the players: "When you see me [an elephant], begin the climb." This is one of the objectives of the game's final level.
• In Spencer's room, you can see a poster for Uncharted 4: A Thief's End . Spencer would eventually have to emulate Nathan Drake's moves from that game, such as the use of a grappling hook.
• The guards at the Transportation Shack wear vests made of rhinoceros-skin. In the next scene, the team has to deal with a rhino herd .
• A Form You Are Comfortable With : Jumanji shapeshifts into a console game (and subsequently becomes the console itself) when Alex rejects its board game form as boring.
• "Freaky Friday" Flip : The Central Theme ; each high school archetype is transformed into the opposite action hero archetype.
• Free-Sample Plot Coupon : The party is given the Jaguar's Eye at the very beginning of the game.
• Gender-Blender Name : "Shelly" is a name commonly used as both a feminine and masculine name in modern times, also contributing to Bethany's shock that Shelly was male. She didn't realize it was short for Sheldon.
• Gender-Equal Ensemble : Played with. Spencer and Fridge are male, Martha and Bethany are female, though Bethany ends up in a man's body in Jumanji. Averted later when they are joined by Alex.
• The Generation Gap : Nineties kid Alex, compared to Spencer and the others from the New Tens — Alex has no clue about mobile phones aside tech gadgets, thinks about different celebrities, and of course uses different slang.
• Generic Doomsday Villain : Van Pelt really has no motivation for his actions. It's justified since he's solely created to be a generic threat to inconvenience the heroes in a '90s-style video game where engaging plot was a secondary concern. He cannot even truly be said to be the Big Bad . That would be Jumanji itself .
• Spencer is fully aware of video-game tropes and knows most of the rules regarding what to do... most of the time .
• Alex takes it up to eleven where it's revealed he survived in Jumanji alone thanks to his gamer skills.
• Genre Shift : Both this film and the original share Coming of Age Story elements, but the original borders on being an outright Horror story, while this one much more heavily leans toward Action Comedy.
• The Ghost : We never see Bethany's boyfriend, Noah, who she split up with shortly before the events of the film, but she mentions him several times throughout the film. According to Spencer's comment during gym class, he's a football player like Fridge.
• Gilligan Cut : At one point, Spencer tries to convince Fridge to get on his back, much to Fridge's annoyance, insisting that he would rather die. Cut to Fridge on Spencer's back, fleeing from Van Pelt's goons.
• Glasses Pull : After a shot from one of Van Pelt's goons damages the helicopter Alex is flying, he pulls off his Cool Shades as he struggles to control it.
• God-Mode Sue : Invoked and Played for Laughs with "Dr. Smolder Bravestone", an Adventurer Archaeologist who is strong, fast, handsome, and charismatic (he has "Smoldering Intensity" as a skill), and even has Super-Strength in a setting where no-one else does. His weaknesses are listed as "None". The other characters quickly lampshade on seeing Spencer's stats that his character is by far the best. Fall damage and jaguars do manage to kill him, however.
• Graceful Landing, Clumsy Landing : As Smoulder Bravestone, Spencer always lands on his feet after respawning. The others have far less dignified experiences with it, such as Martha and Bethany landing on Fridge whenever they respawn .
• Gretzky Has the Ball : When Martha tries to make a simulated sports call, she gets everything wrong that she possibly could.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power : Zoology turns out to be really useful, as it allows Mouse to defang a Black Mamba and tame an elephant .
• "Hell, Yes!" Moment : Alex had one when he came across Spencer, Fridge, Martha, and Bethany at the bazaar, as he realized he was no longer on his own in Jumanji with only NPCs for company.
• Hellish Horse : Fridge worries that he will be chased by an enormous killer zebra due to his avatar's lack of speed. Luckily, no zebra appears during his stay in Jumanji.
• Here We Go Again! : Defied Trope . Unlike the original, the teens don't just bury the Jumanji game somewhere. Instead, on remembering that it's still out there, they destroy it. Time will tell if it actually sticks.
• The opening scene shows people jogging on the beach where the Jumanji game washed up, including Alex's dad, who finds the game and brings it home.
• Alex and Spencer are introduced playing video games in their respective bedrooms.
• After escaping from the bazaar, the group are seen chilling out in Alex's tree house before they head off to the transportation shed.
• At the end, Bethany invites her friend, Lucinda, to go on a nature hike in the summer and she is quite shocked by the invitation.
• Played for Laughs . Seeing that Fridge has two lives left, Spencer tosses him out of the helicopter to distract the rhinos while they retrieve the jewel. Fridge is not amused.
• Played straight later when Bethany gives one of her lives to Alex to save him .
• And at the end, Martha sacrifices her second life in order to get the jewel to Spencer .
• Spencer is braver than he thought.
• Fridge is more intelligent than he thought.
• Bethany is more resourceful and empathetic than she thought.
• Martha is more outgoing than she thought.
• High-Dive Escape : At "The Mighty Roar", the quartet escape from the bikers by jumping off the cliff into the pool below the waterfall.
• Homework Slave : Not so much a direct bullying example as much as a peer pressure example, but jock Fridge convinces him former childhood friend Spencer to write an essay for him so that he can focus on athletics — an act that gets the two thrown in detention.
• Honorable Elephant : Fridge tames an elephant that helps the group in fighting Van Pelt.
• How Do I Shot Web? : The characters can't always control their avatars' skills. Bethany has it the easiest — she's the only one who can read the map — but Martha is shocked the first time she does acrobatic flips as Ruby Roundhouse, Fridge keeps getting annoyed and incredulous when he spontaneously spouts off trivia about nearby animals, and as for Bravestone's smoldering intensity... Martha: So can you control when you do that, or does it just happen naturally? Spencer: [with a suddenly deeper voice] It just happens naturally. [smolders intensely]
• Human Pack Mule : Mouse is explicitly good at being a valet, so he holds onto the various objects the group has. He even calls himself "Backpack guy" at one point.
• "I Can't Look!" Gesture : Bethany after Fridge is trampled to death by the rhino stampede.
• I Choose to Stay : After winning the game, Spencer wants to stay as Bravestone and never return to the real world, then asks Martha to stay in the game with him. Martha convinces him to leave the game once she does it .
• I Know Mortal Kombat : Or rather, I Know Street Fighter . Spencer uses his moves as Zangief in SFV to fight Van Pelt's mooks as Dr. Bravestone.
• Immortality Field : Downplayed. Instead of colliding with the real world like in the first film , Jumanji remained as a separate world that follows Video Game logic. It gives the players three Video-Game Lives each as a form of limited Resurrective Immortality . However, in Jumanji where Everything Is Trying to Kill You and most of them were given Weaksauce Weaknesses , this seems like a fair trade-off.
• Van Pelt fires his gun at Nigel three times when Nigel steals the jewel from him, but misses each time and Nigel is able to flee into the woods.
• During "The Mighty Roar" level, the motorcycle henchmen unleash several bullets and missiles on the heroes, but they only manage to shoot Martha during the High-Dive Escape . Even then, she only ends up with one bullet in her body.
• Subverted later when the guards open fire on the helicopter with missiles when it flies out of the transportation shed, as they miss at first but then hit it and cause enough damage to prevent it from going up or down until Spencer is later able to repair it.
• I Owe You My Life : Alex to Bethany after she uses her second life to save him after he gets bitten by a mosquito and almost dies. At the end of the film, we find out that in gratitude because of this trope, Alex named his daughter after Bethany.
• It Can Think : While it was heavily implied that Jumanji was sentient in the original film, this one outright confirms it. When Alex tosses the board game aside in favor of playing his video games, the game transforms itself into a video game console. Not only was this essentually the evolution of Jumanji, the game consciously made a decision in order to attract potential victims.
• It's All About Me : Bethany at first. Thanks to Character Development , she grows out of it. Teacher: You're aware there are other people in the world, right?
• It's All My Fault : Spencer tries to take the blame when he and Fridge are busted for Spencer doing Fridge's assignment. He claims he made Fridge have him write his essay. No-one buys it, and Fridge is annoyed.
• It Won't Turn Off : When the game system with the Jumanji cartridge in it starts going crazy after the four students press Start, Spencer goes as far as to unplug the system, but it sucks them in anyway.
• When the kids get sucked into the game, Bethany's first reaction after freaking out over being in an overweight male avatar is to freak out over not having her phone. When the others call her out on her Skewed Priorities , Bethany retorts this is the perfect time to have it, as she could use it to contact someone for help.
• On a more personal level, Bethany comments that Martha already dismissed her as a bad person based on nothing but the typical high-school clichés, and that they don't even know each other so she shouldn't be so quick to judge. Martha actually concedes the point.
• Jerk Jock : Fridge is this at the beginning. Thanks to Jumanji, he grows out of it .
• Fridge. He is a Jerk Jock who forces Spencer to do his homework, looks down on him, and appears to be a bit arrogant — as in, when his Berserk Button is pushed by Spencer, he pushes Spencer off a cliff. However, he's still fundamentally a good person and a good friend to Spencer nonetheless, and in Jumanji, he pulls through for the others numerous times, rouses Spencer by telling him You Are Better Than You Think You Are , and he saves the others in a Big Damn Heroes moment by riding in on an elephant .
• Bethany too, as while she is at first pretty shallow, uncaring, and self-absorbed, she proves she too has a nicer side, as she coaches Martha in flirting techniques, proves to be a Shipper on Deck for Spencer and Martha, and gives one of her lives to save Alex from certain death .
• Jungle Drums : They're back, and the players quickly catch on that they mean something bad is about to happen.
• Jungle Opera : The entire setting of Jumanji is based on this trope including such staples as death traps, wild animals, a crowded marketplace, a waterfall, and a giant animal totem complete with jeweled eye.
• Jungles Sound Like Kookaburras : When Spencer first arrives in the jungle and is looking around, the distinctive cries of kookaburras can be distinctly heard. Of course, the fictional land of Jumanji features wildlife from all over the globe, so kookaburras might actually be native.
• Just Eat Gilligan : The in-game story would've probably been over and done with if Nigel just went directly for the Jaguar statue and returned the jewel after swiping it from Van Pelt instead of writing a letter to Dr. Bravestone and having his team do it for him, allowing Van Pelt to mobilize his men and have time to prepare obstacles for the player characters. Then again , it's an Excuse Plot in a video game meant to set a goal for the characters to reach. It does make it clear that the skills of all five players are required for success.
• Kaizo Trap : Alex almost dies to a mosquito after escaping the rhino ravine.
• Fridge gets his comeuppance for shoving Spencer off of a cliff out of spite — and costing Spencer one of his lives — when Spencer forces a Heroic Sacrifice on him by tossing him out of a helicopter and to the mercy of some rhinos, leading to Fridge losing one of his own lives. Granted, it wasn't so much out of spite as it was for distraction to get the jewel back but Fridge was the one who dropped it in the first place and given his jerkassery up to this point, he pretty much had it coming.
• Also, he mocks Spencer for having allergies and dies from eating cake, which is Mouse Finbar's weakness and may allude to some sort of food allergy.
• Fridge, an arrogant Jerk Jock , is transformed into the weak, slow, Plucky Comic Relief .
• Bethany, a vain, self-absorbed teenager, is transformed into an older, overweight man.
• Spencer and Martha, both nonathletic introverts, are transformed into a charismatic Ace and Action Girl who are forced to come out of their shells in order to protect the rest of the party.
• Killed Mid-Sentence : Bethany and Fridge are both in the middle of talking to the others when they die for the first time. In particular, in Fridge's case, he is cut off by exploding because he ate a piece of cake.
• Kilroy Was Here : When taking refuge in an old abandoned treehouse, the teens find a sign saying " Alan Parrish Was Here". They have no idea who that is, but they assume he was someone else who got sucked into the game.
• Kiss of Life : Parodied. Alex is on the verge of losing his last life after being stung by a mosquito (his character's weakness) and Bethany tries to save him by administering CPR. However, by doing so, she ends up transferring one of her own lives to him, although she finds that this works too.
• Knight of Cerebus : The comedic tone of the film is significantly dampened whenever Van Pelt comes on screen.
• One of Mouse's numerous weaknesses is "cake". As in, when Fridge (playing as Mouse) accidentally eats some, he explodes. Luckily, each character gets three lives.
• Ruby Roundhouse's weakness is venom. In the final level, Martha (playing as Ruby) deliberately gets bitten by venomous snakes in order to die and respawn out of reach of the Big Bad, taking the Jaguar's Eye with her.
• Seaplane's weakness is mosquitoes. Alex, playing as Seaplane, is bit by a mosquito after escaping the ravine and nearly dies.
• Spencer effortlessly beats up the goons at the bazaar, all while Calling His Attacks , repairs the helicopter in flight to get them away from the Rhino Rampage , and rides up to the jaguar statue on a motorbike to get the jewel up to the top.
• Fridge defangs the black mamba, comes up with a plan to get them past the Schmuck Bait of the final level of the game, and causes a Big Damn Heroes moment with an elephant .
• Martha tries to invoke Distracted by the Sexy on some guards so the others can sneak into the hangar, but when a radio starts playing "Baby, I Love Your Way", she starts dancing and beats up the guards with ease. She later does the same thing in the final level.
• Martha's own LGD moment provides Alex with enough confidence to pilot the helicopter. He looks up with determination, says, "Seaplane McDonough , reporting for duty. Let's go, people!", dons a pair of Cool Shades , and pilots the helicopter through the canyon and a Rhino Rampage .
• Bethany manages one where, while the others are panicking over Alex being bitten by a mosquito and passing out, she does CPR on him and manages to transfer one of her lives to him . She and Alex also fend off Van Pelt in the climax to stop him from getting the jewel while Spencer and Martha are going after it.
• Lighter and Softer : The sequel is softer in tone compared to the more horror-lite elements and depressing tone of the first film, with more emphasis on the "Freaky Friday" Flip hijinks of the teens, plenty of good-natured chiding of the plot, and deaths that are largely Played for Laughs .
• Lightning Bruiser : Smolder Bravestone's stats make him out to be the strongest and fastest out of all the playable characters.
• Like Father, Like Son : Alex reveals to Bethany that his real self in 1996 is a full-on metalhead, and that he wants to be a drummer, like his dad.
• Little "No" : Van Pelt in the climax when he realizes Martha will give the Jaguar's Eye to Spencer as she respawns, and thus get it back to the statue.
• The Load : Fridge, for the most part, when the group is sucked into Jumanji. His character is the smallest, slowest and weakest in the game, he has the fewest strengths and the most weaknesses, and at one point it's played literally, when Spencer picks up Fridge and runs with him in the second level to get them away from Van Pelt's henchmen. He spends a lot of time complaining, costs one of Spencer's lives in a moment of rage after his Berserk Button is pushed, and accidentally drops the jewel out of the helicopter in the canyon scene. On the other hand, he makes very good use of the strengths he does have , which helps out the group a few times, especially in the final level.
• MacGuffin Escort Mission : The objective of the video game. The heroes must return the Jaguar's Eye jewel to a very large jaguar statue.
• MacGuffin-Person Reveal : The party is told to look for a "missing piece" and they initially assume that it's the missing piece of their map. They later realize that Alex, who joins their party in the sewer, is the "missing piece" that completes their team.
• Male Restroom Etiquette : Fridge and Spencer tell Bethany (who is in a male body) most emphatically that you do not look at another man's penis while they are peeing.
• Man, I Feel Like a Woman : First defied and inverted when Bethany becomes the male Sheldon Oberon — she says she's been dreading the prospect of checking out her new equipment. As the movie goes on, she starts to get used to things, or at least isn't so disturbed. Then, in the end, played... sort of straight. When she's back in her own body, she grasps her own chest and whispers, "I missed you."
• May–December Romance : Played with, but one-sided, in the case of Bethany and Alex . Bethany is the one enamored with Alex despite their age difference.
• May It Never Happen Again : It starts with Spencer discovering the game in a room in his school (and it transforming into a videogame when Alex originally decides not to play because it's a tabletop one) and ends with Fridge smashing the cartridge and console with a bowling ball to prevent anybody from playing again.
• "Smolder Bravestone" is played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Also, the name Bravestone is made up of the words “bravest one”. His avatar is meant to be the bravest one, and part of Spencer’s Character Development is learning to be more courageous.
• Also, the beautiful redheaded female character is named "Ruby Roundhouse" which is a type of kick used in many martial arts, which she is very good at. Her real name, Martha, sounds similar to the Spanish word for kill, matar , which fits well given that her avatar, Ruby Roundhouse, is called a “killer of men”.
• Alex. Alex is short for Alexander, a Greek name meaning "protector/defender of men". Appropriate, given that the first thing we see Alex do in Jumanji is pull off a Big Damn Heroes moment that saves the others from Van Pelt and allows them to escape from the bazaar, after which he protects them from a series of traps in the underground passages. He also protects Spencer in the final level by distracting the jaguars as a diversion, offers his life in place of Bethany's when she is taken hostage — even though it's his last life, which Bethany herself gave him — and even trying to attack Van Pelt to protect Bethany.
• The four teens are confused when they find themselves watching a cutscene.
• Unlike the other NPCs , Van Pelt seems to be at least somewhat aware that he's in a game because he says "Game Over" at one point when he thinks he's about to win, and doesn't seem surprised at Martha's death and respawn but more that he can't stop her getting away with the jewel.
• Megaton Punch : Spencer manages to punch someone so hard they go flying into the sky, through a roof.
• Metafictional Title : Jumanji is the name of the game the characters get sucked into. It's also the name of the game world.
• Metagame : Happens in-universe. Once everyone gets familiar with the basic rules of the game, they start abusing its logical loops. Most prominently, the finale openly hinges on how exactly respawn mechanics operate, allowing Martha to pass the jewel to Spencer mid-air .
• Midair Repair : After the helicopter is damaged by gunfire and unable to ascend, Spencer climbs onto the roof to reconnect the control arm to the rotor.
• Mineral Macguffin : The player characters have to return the giant emerald eye to the jaguar statue to lift the curse on Jumanji.
• Misplaced-Names Poster : On the poster where the four leads are in the water, only Karen Gillan's name is lined up with her image. And on the poster where the leads are standing in the jungle, none of the names match up. They are standing one person to the right of where their name is above them. The names don't match up on the poster at the top of the page, either.
• Misplaced Wildlife : Although the majority of the game's animal threats are African in origin, the jaguars are South American, the squirrel is North American, and the orangutans Alex mentions are from Indonesia and Malaysia. Its sequel The Next Level adds an anaconda.
• Monster-Shaped Mountain : The end goal of the game is the summit of an enormous, jaguar-shaped mountain.
• The end of the cutscene shows Van Pelt shooting at a fleeing Nigel and ordering his henchmen to bring him back the jewel and to kill anyone who tries to stop them, then it abruptly cuts back to Nigel in his jeep cheerfully giving the jewel to a shocked Spencer.
• The whole gang laugh at Fridge's incident with the rhinos. Right before Alex gets bitten by a mosquito. He swats it casually, no big deal. Then everyone remembers mosquitoes are Seaplane's weakness . And Alex passes out.
• Morphic Resonance : The game console form Jumanji takes is not too dissimilar from an old Atari 2600 with wood-paneling and a large gemstone attached to the top of the machine. The game's original form was a wooden board game with that same gemstone embedded in the center of the board.
• Mosquito Miscreants : Mosquitoes are a weakness of Seaplane McDonough . One of them could have killed Alex if Bethany had not given up her extra life for him.
• Mr. Exposition : Nigel is a deliberately over-the-top version of this: as an NPC, he's actually incapable of any interaction that doesn't involve telling the players what they should be doing.
• Mr. Fanservice : While not wearing a revealing outfit like Ruby, Smolder Bravestone is buff, wears a very tight short-sleeved shirt, and one of his skills is based on his looks.
• Ruby Roundhouse's outfit is based upon Lara Croft's early tank top and short-shorts. Martha's not too happy about it and even points out how inappropriate it is. Martha: Why am I wearing this outfit in a jungle? Tiny, little shorts and a leather halter top. I mean, what is this?
• Humorously averted with Bethany, who believed that Professor Shelly Oberon is going to be a sexy scientist based around the "curvy genius" wording. Turns out , he's a "curvy genius" in the form of Jack Black .
• My Beloved Smother : Spencer has one, as she tells him rapid-fire in his opening scene not to forget to take his EpiPen to school, that the world is a terrifying place, to be careful of everything, and that she loves him more than life itself.
• The board game becoming a cartridge is similar to how it became Zathura in the original books, after falling into the hands of a boy who wasn't interested in a jungle game.
• The words "A game for those who seek to find a way to leave their world behind" appear in the green circle in the middle of the screen by swirling into view in two phases, just like the clues on the board game version in the 'toon (and not like the clues in the original film, where the effect was more like the words were floating up from beneath the surface of murky waters and the entire sentence appeared at once.)
• There is a trader, reminiscent of the animated series character, Trader Slick. There's also an NPC called Nigel; Tim Curry (Trader Slick's VA), has also played a character called Nigel who went adventuring in Africa .
• The green emerald that Van Pelt wants, which gave him the power to control Jumanji's animals, sounds reminiscent of the dice from the animated series episode "No Dice" , where the dice, once taken into the game, glowed red and repelled all the animal threats in the game.
• The characters find themselves in Alan Parrish's tree-house at one point, which was also in the animated series .
• In the cartoon, one of the ways to get sucked into the game is if you treat Jumanji badly, it will suck you in out of spite. Alex gave it a unique insult, so it found a unique way to entrap him.
• The Napoleon : Fridge as Mouse Finbar, due to how, by his own admission, he is about two feet shorter than his real self.
• Narnia Time : The best way to describe the time flow in the game. Months can pass by in the game while it may be years on the outside for other players, but you'll always come home to exactly the time you were in before getting sucked in the game.
• Nature Tinkling : Spencer, Fridge, and Bethany all relieve themselves in the jungle, with Bethany having to be instructed on how to do so in a male body.
• Neck Snap : Spencer takes out one of Van Pelt's henchmen at the bazaar with one of these.
• Nerds Are Sexy : Humorously subverted. Bethany assumed her avatar, Shelly Oberon, was this thanks to the description of "curvy genius". She lets out a Big "NO!" when she sees what her avatar really looked like .
• Neural Implanting : Implied, as the players becoming their avatars gives them the assigned knowledge and skill set at appropriate times in the game. They are notably confused when it happens, and they otherwise retain all their real-world personality quirks and hang-ups.
• Never My Fault : Fridge blames Spencer for getting him kicked off the football team for cheating, despite the fact that Fridge was the one who asked Spencer to help him cheat with his homework in the first place.
• Never Smile at a Crocodile : Upon meeting Alex, our heroes must follow him through an underground level to escape Van Pelt and his henchmen, which includes crossing a wooden plank over a pool filled with hungry crocs.
• Nobody Calls Me "Chicken"! : A variant; Martha first defers from playing the game because she wants to finish their detention and get it over with so they don't have to come back the next day. Bethany snarks that Martha doesn't know how to have fun. Chagrined, Martha puts down the stapler remover and chooses a character.
• Non-Human Sidekick : Van Pelt has a vulture which acts as a scout for him.
• Noodle Incident : Spencer never reveals what happened that makes him so insistent that Bethany "aim" when she is learning how to urinate as a man. Apparently, it's not a story for mixed company.
• Not Hyperbole : When it's said that Fridge's avatar's weakness is cake, it doesn't mean that he has an uncontrollable sweet tooth. Eating cake makes him explode .
• Not the Intended Use : Martha deliberately exploits her "venom" weakness and lets herself get killed by a snake so that she can get the Jaguar's Eye to Spencer, far above her, when she respawns and falls from the sky.
• No, You : After Bethany loses her first life to a hippo that came out of a river, Fridge and Spencer have this exchange: Fridge: Oh, my God! You better get in there and go save her! Spencer: I'm not getting in there! You get in there! Fridge: I'm not going anywhere! I got a backpack on. You don't get in water with a backpack. Everybody knows that!
• Odd Friendship : The kids are pretty different from each other, but eventually become good friends over the course of completing the game.
• Offscreen Breakup : Bethany split up with her boyfriend, Noah, shortly before the events of the film, and she's feeling quite upset about it, which actually causes her detention (for having a phone conversation about it having finished a test in class).
• Martha at the beginning while talking to her gym coach, after saying she doesn't want to end up as one. Doubles as a That Came Out Wrong moment.
• Spencer gets one when he gets called to the main office and discovers that Fridge's history teacher figured out that Spencer has written Fridge's essay. Spencer: Is it getting hot in here?
• All four of them when they first get sucked into Jumanji.
• Bethany when she realizes that she ended up in an overweight male avatar. Eventually, she comes to grips with it.
• Martha, Fridge, and Spencer when Bethany loses her first life to a man-eating hippo . Then after she respawns, Martha gets another one when she sees that a whole herd is coming after them.
• All four of them when several of Van Pelt's motorcycle goons show up in the second level armed with machine guns and missile launchers. Fridge: What is this game?!
• At the end of "The Mighty Roar", Fridge, Bethany, and Spencer when Martha reveals she has been shot, before she explodes into a red cloud.
• Martha when she realizes Fridge has eaten cake by accident, which is one of his weaknesses.
• All four of them at the bazaar when Spencer removes the basket lid and the black mamba strikes.
• All four of them when Van Pelt's henchmen come across them at the bazaar.
• Martha when she realizes the others want her to flirt with the guards to get inside the transportation shed. (Her fear coming from the fact that she has never flirted before and finds it difficult talking to guys.)
• Fridge, when he notices the henchmen approaching the transportation shed after the five have made it inside.
• Fridge when he accidentally drops the jewel out of the helicopter. Obviously, the others are not happy when they find out moments later.
• Fridge has one when the albino rhinos start coming towards him, when Spencer uses him as a distraction to retrieve the jewel after Fridge accidentally dropped it out of the helicopter.
• Alex, after the canyon scene when he swats a mosquito on his neck that had just bitten him, and then remembers they are his weakness and he is on his last life. Bethany, Martha, and Spencer then get one when Alex passes out moments later.
• Towards the end, while climbing, Spencer gets spooked by a squirrel and falls out of the tree he was in, then sees a jaguar standing right above his head. He dies right after.
• All of them when Bethany points out the henchmen approaching again during "The Defenders" as Fridge is outlining his plan to get to the jaguar statue.
• The henchman dragging Martha behind his bike in "The Defenders" level has one right before Spencer whacks him with a tree branch.
• Also a subverted one. Fridge starts to have one as the elephant charges at him, before he braces himself and orders it to stop, which it does.
• Van Pelt, accompanied by a Little "No" , when he sees that Spencer and Martha have gotten the Jaguar's Eye away from him and are about to put it back in the statue.
• The gang quickly learns to recognize that whenever the Jumanji drums start to play, something bad is about to happen.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder : Played straight most of the time, as pretty much every antagonistic thing in the game can immediately cost the players a life.
• One-Hit Kill : While some things in the game won't do it, it's played dangerously straight with anything that's a particular weakness of a player character.
• Only Known by Their Nickname : Fridge's real name is Anthony Johnson, but only his mom and history teacher call him that.
• Overnight Age-Up : Once they're sucked into the game, the teens are turned into the adult avatars they chose when they started playing.
• Orbital Shot : Used during the Big Damn Kiss at the end.
• Justified in that the Jumanji game is frozen as a 1990s game console because it was started by Alex back in 1996 and it can't morph into anything else until that game session is completed. As such it features the primitive trappings of a mid-'90s Action-Adventure RPG which are all but nonexistent in 2017 gaming. This forces ubernerd Spencer to function as Mr. Exposition for all the outdated video game tropes the group encounters: limited lives, looping dialogue, railroad plot, random puzzles, etc.
• Averted for when Alex and Spencer are shown playing video games, and they're actual video games appropriate to the time period. Alex is playing Twisted Metal in 1996, and Spencer is playing Street Fighter V in 2017, and they're using PlayStation controllers to play (this movie was made by Sony, after all). The console that Alex pops the Jumanji cartridge into isn't any real console, but this is likely intention in the name of Bland-Name Product ; the console's appearance still matches the aesthetics of numerous early '80s consoles, such as wood grain paneling and large controller ports.
• Panthera Awesome : The Jaguar Shrine is aptly protected by jaguars.
• Phoneaholic Teenager : Bethany. The first thing we see her do (as part of her Establishing Character Moment ) is stage a "waking-up" selfie for her Instagram page, she makes a phone call during a quiz (after finishing it) which gets her sent to detention because the other students are still doing the quiz, is seen on the phone again while jogging in gym class, complains that she has no reception during the detention before being sucked into the game, and freaks out in the game when she realizes she doesn't have her phone. Part of her Character Development is learning to overcome this.
• Please Wake Up : When Alex nearly dies from a mosquito bite, Spencer begs him to wake up and quickly recites how to do CPR. Bethany saves Alex by transferring her extra life, subverting the trope .
• Plot Tailored to the Party : Justified. Jumanji is built to utilize each character's skills and has at least one moment where a specific skill is required to continue.
• Poison Mushroom : Fridge is very hungry, and so he eats some bread-like food advertised as "rations". It's only after he eats it that he is told that it is cake, which is his player character's weakness. Cue him exploding.
• P.O.V. Cam : Seen when the characters first arrive in Jumanji, as the camera follows Spencer in the body of Bravestone running through thick jungle foliage before going over the edge of a cliff, dropping through the sky and landing in the jungle.
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner : After her flirtation attempt at the transportation shack goes awry, Martha decides to beat up the guards instead. A radio begins playing "Baby, I Love Your Way" and, remembering one of Ruby's skills is dance fighting, she asks the guards, "Do you guys like to dance?"
• Present-Day Past : "Gettin' Jiggy Wit It" didn't come out until 1997, one year after Alex was sucked into the game, but he drops a reference to it anyway.
• Spencer plays Street Fighter V on a PlayStation 4 and his room is covered with posters for games like Uncharted 4: A Thief's End and The Last Guardian , both of which are PlayStation exclusives. Ruby Roundhouse's Leitmotif is also played on a Sony boombox. Alex Vreeke is also playing a PlayStation in the 1996 prologue. Have we mentioned this movie was made by Sony yet?
• Instagram appears at the beginning when Bethany takes her "walking up" selfie", and Bethany references it in the game too.
• Psycho Knife Nut : One of Van Pelt's henchmen in the bazaar sequence, who attacks the group by hurling knives at them and almost kills Fridge with one .
• Punched Across the Room : At the bazaar, Spencer gleefully discovers that Smolder's strength lets him punch people through walls, into the sky, through stone pillars, etc.
• Raging Stiffie : Bethany, in Oberon's body, gets an erection after she hugs Alex. Spencer and Fridge have to point it out to her.
• Reasonable Authority Figure : All of the teachers and principal when they bust the kids for their various misconducts. For example, Bethany and Martha's teachers give them a chance to stop their offenses, and give them detention only when they refuse to relent. The principal in particular tells them You Are Better Than You Think You Are before escorting them to detention. Considering that Bethany and Martha mouthed off to their teachers, and Fridge coerced Spencer into writing his essay, two days of detention aren't that bad of a punishment. Fridge actually gets the worst punishment by also getting kicked off the football team, but that's because he cheated by coercing an ace student to help him.
• Played very straight with Ruby Roundhouse. Her first name is a red gemstone, she has red hair, and the top part of her outfit is red. The screen detailing her strengths and weaknesses is also outlined in red letters.
• Played with in Bethany's case early on, as her real self wears a red top, but she is still self-absorbed at this point and her good side comes out later in Jumanji while she's in the body of Shelly Oberon.
• Red Right Hand : After stealing the jewel, Van Pelt's left eye turns green as a side effect.
• Reluctant Fanservice Girl : Martha as Ruby Roundhouse. She asks why she's wearing such a revealing outfit in the jungle, and later asks Bethany for her jacket so she can cover herself up.
• Rescue Romance : Bethany starts crushing on Alex after he saves them from Van Pelt. He starts returning her feelings after she saves him in turn.
• Resurrection Teleportation : Martha sacrifices one of her lives in order to respawn away from a horde of venomous snakes she gets trapped in while traversing the final level, "The Defenders".
• Spencer , who has been transformed into the video game character Dr. Smolder Bravestone, is initially the only one to be happy with his character's body once he gets past the shock, marveling at his huge muscles. He comes close to not going back in order to stay this way.
• Double Subverted with Bethany , who gets stuck in the overweight, middle-aged, male body of Dr. Shelly Oberon. Her initial reaction is a Big "NO!" , but she gets fascinated by one particular part of Dr. Oberon's anatomy when it comes time to go to the bathroom .
• Revision : The nature of Jumanji's Reset Button changes from the first movie to this one, as Judy and Peter don't have any memories of Alan, Sarah, or playing the game, while the kids this time around remember everything . The game is shown to send everyone back to when they first played the game, and the first film explicitly indicates that the timeline has not yet caught up to the point where Judy and Peter would have played the game, as evidenced by Sarah and Alan invoking Set Right What Once Went Wrong to save Judy and Peter's parents.
• Rhino Rampage : Occurs when the heroes' helicopter loses vertical control and ends up in a ravine. Many rhinos run after the helicopter and repeatedly bash it until Spencer manages to fix it. Then immediately afterwards, Fridge manages to drop the Jaguar's Eye and the rhinos end up guarding it. In order to get the Jaguar's Eye back, Spencer sacrifices Fridge's second life by tossing him out of the helicopter to cause the rhinos to rampage toward him.
• When the characters first encounter Nigel, he recites the goal of the game to them like this, even saying he will say it in verse.
• The boy at the bazaar also speaks like this when he tells the characters about their next challenge.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory : After the heroes win the game, they create a new timeline where everything is like Alex never disappeared from reality, but Spencer, Fridge, Bethany, and Martha retain their memories from the original timeline. In Alex's case, since he's been stuck in the game since 1996, he has no memory of the original timeline, only second-hand information from the other four.
• Each of the characters has three lives in the game.
• Nigel says that if they want to leave the game, they must save Jumanji and call out its name, saying it three times.
• Alex attempts the transportation shed level three times, though he attempted the first two alone before the others joined him, and lost a life on each attempt. He is ultimately successful on his third attempt, as he now has the others with him.
• Characters get stung by mosquitoes three times. First Martha, then Spencer, then Alex. Which are his weakness, and he's on his last life .
• Spencer can't control when he smolders. Similarly, Bethany and Martha swooning over said smolder, and Fridge getting annoyed by it.
• Fridge getting freaked out by his encyclopedic knowledge of animals.
• Bethany's amazement and intrigue over having a penis.
• One of the players forgetting that they are in a video game and attempting to talk to a NPC as if they are a real person by saying something which doesn't trigger any of the NPC's pre-programmed responses, prompting the NPC to give them a confused look before repeating their opening line when their A.I. script loops back to the beginning.
• Bethany when Martha jumps off the cliff to escape from the bikers. Bethany herself then jumps, followed by Spencer and Fridge moments later.
• Martha when Fridge, in a moment of anger after Spencer presses his Berserk Button , pushes Spencer off a cliff to his death.
• Martha does it again when Spencer is trying to fix the helicopter in mid-flight, while hanging on to it by his bare hands.
• Fridge when Spencer loses his second life to a jaguar .
• Bethany when Spencer respawns after being killed by a jaguar .
• Bethany again when Van Pelt overpowers Alex in the climax .
• Scared of What's Behind You : Soon after first landing in Jumanji, Martha has an Oh, Crap! reaction to the hippo behind Bethany before it attacks and eats her.
• Scary Scorpions : Van Pelt commands a scorpion to sting and kill one of his henchmen when the latter failed to find the main characters.
• Alex refuses to play Jumanji ("Who plays board games anymore?") and plays a video game instead. Jumanji turns itself into a video game overnight. Upon seeing the change, Alex immediately plays it, never questioning the fact the game just changed itself.
• Subverted at the end. Upon seeing the straight path to the jaguar statue be lit up by the torches running down its sides, everyone immediately concludes it's a trap, and they can't just walk down it.
• School Forced Us Together : The main characters already knew of each other, but only two of the main characters (Spencer and Fridge) actually knew each other. They all meet serving the same detention.
• Screwball Squirrel : Downplayed. A squirrel appears in the final level of Jumanji but it does not attack Spencer when he tries to go out of bounds by climbing the trees. The squirrel simply scares Spencer into falling back to the ground before he is mauled by a jaguar, costing him one life.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here : Bethany references the trope with this line: "Why can't we just leave, stop the game, without doing all this stuff?!" Because they have to Win to Exit , quitting the game isn't an option.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy : Fridge got Spencer to do his homework because he needed to improve his grades in order to stay on the football team. When his history teacher figures out what is going on, the other punishment Fridge gets for cheating is losing his spot on the football team.
• This time around, all the players get sucked into the game at the beginning, because it now takes place inside the Jumanji world. As a result, instead of relying on outside help to get them out, they have to Win to Exit .
• The original film was more about having to deal with each encounter as it happens, which gradually piles on throughout the movie. This film reflects video games in the increasing difficulty of each encounter as you get closer to the end. So the solution to every event in the original is just "run away", and once they regroup they just roll the dice again. The video game version relies more on strategy and teamwork, with each level getting harder than the previous one and "Bravestone" can't just One-Man Army his way to the finish. The fact that the players are also in Jumanji with video-game avatars and multiple lives also allows for sequences that are much crazier.
• Sewer Gator : A bunch of crocodiles attack the party when they try to cross a gap with a plank in an underground sewer escape level.
• Shameless Fanservice Girl : Bethany tells Martha she once wore a bikini to school. It got her sent to the principal's office .
• Signature Move : Spencer/Smolder performs a "Rock Bottom" slam, one of The Rock's signature wrestling moves, on one of the Faceless Goons .
• Spencer is dressed in looser, less conservative clothes, reflecting his newfound confidence.
• Bethany, conversely, is dressed much more modestly (compared to her midriff-baring getup earlier in the film), showing how she's learning to move beyond appearances.
• Sixth Ranger : Played with. The group of four eventually gains a fifth member in the form of Alex/Seaplane McDonough . However, he actually started playing the game twenty years before them.
• Skyward Scream : To end the game, the entire party shouts the word "Jumanji" out to the sky after placing the Jaguar's Eye back into a gargantuan jaguar statue.
• Bethany gets detention for starting a video call after she finishes a quiz, in the middle of class. As the teacher points out, she may have finished, but it's rude and disruptive to the other students.
• Martha gets annoyed when the rest of the teens decide to hook up an old game to a monitor rather than focus on their detention, especially since they were going to have to return the next day if they didn't finish cleaning out the basement. The only reason why she agrees to play the game is because Bethany mocks her.
• Justified with the NPC s; they have to follow their programming to the letter, down to rhyming all their clues, rather than explain things better. The teens get annoyed when Nigel only repeats scripted words to them rather than answering their questions.
• Played with. Bethany is horrified to see that her avatar, Shelly Oberon, is an overweight, middle-aged man, then asks where her phone is. While in the middle of the jungle. And despite it coming across as this trope, Bethany has a good point when she points out that she can at least use her phone to try and get help.
• The Smurfette Principle : Played with. While two of the players are female , the game only provides one female avatar while providing four male avatars.
• Snakes Are Sinister : The highly venomous black mambas are among the hazards in Jumanji.
• Soft Reboot : Beyond the "real-world" setting of the fictional Brantford, New Hampshire, and the appearance of Alan Parrish's makeshift cabin in the game world, which imply continuity with the 1995 film, the film has no connection to the first film beyond the premise of people getting trapped in Jumanji, and has an entirely new cast.
• So Last Season : When Alex finds the game in its board game form, he dismisses it, saying that nobody plays board games anymore. The game decides to up its level by transforming itself into a video game upon seeing Alex playing one.
• Solve the Soup Cans : In the market, the party must solve a riddle involving a venomous snake in a basket in order to receive clues for their quest. The correct answer was to remove the snake's fangs, which Fridge finds out by tapping into the knowledge of his player character, Mouse.
• Something Only They Would Say : Everyone is suspicious when they see each other as their avatars for the first time. In particular, Fridge can't wrap his head around Spencer's transformation into a guy with tree trunks for arms, but when Spencer freaks out at the sound of a bird as he did at the start of the film, Fridge says "Yeah, that's Spencer."
• Soundtrack Dissonance : Martha's "dance fighting" scenes are set to Big Mountain's cover of "Baby, I Love Your Way", a mellow love ballad.
• Spencer tries to unplug the console when it starts tossing sparks. The game turns on regardless.
• Upon arriving in the jungle, Bethany tries to find her phone so that she can call for help or send a distress signal. Obviously, she doesn't have her phone.
• Fridge points out how Nigel could probably just drive them to the Jaguar statue.
• In the climax, the path to the Jaguar statue seems to be an obvious trap. Since Spencer's character is a climber, he decides to climb over the path using the trees and avoid the trap. A squirrel then scares him into falling and getting mauled by the jaguars on the path. Spencer realizes that the trees count as "out of bounds" and they need a strategy to get through the path unharmed.
• Stealth Sequel : It seems to be a Continuity Reboot , then, later on, it's revealed Alex moved into Alan Parrish's old home within the game.
• Stepford Smiler : Bethany before they get sucked in the game is putting on a show of being a savvy, sophisticated social media it girl. She made the phone call during her quiz because her boyfriend has just broken up with her . When arguing with Martha later, she reveals that she's actually feeling a lot of pain about the breakup. Martha points out that hiding all her feelings only makes her seem aloof and disinterested in others.
• The Stinger : After the credits, Jumanji's drums begin to pound again ... even though the game was destroyed...
• Strong Family Resemblance : Downplayed. As seen when Bethany is driven to school by her mother, Bethany's mother looks essentially like an older version of her, as they are both blonde and have the same shape to their eyes.
• Stuff Blowing Up : Fridge explodes after eating a piece of pound cake, because cake is one of his avatar's weaknesses.
• Stumbling in the New Form : All four kids are initially uncomfortable with their avatar bodies. Bethany, as a girly-girl, is particularly freaked out about becoming male (especially when she has to pee!).
• Suddenly Always Knew That : Fridge's avatar gives him extensive zoology knowledge , which freaks him out when he starts reciting facts about the hippo that ate Bethany. Fridge: [speaks casually] That was a hippo. They're omnivorous. They're fast as a horse over short distances, and they have the bite force of 8100 newtons. [freaks out] How do I know this?!
• Suddenly Shouting : Fridge's line to Spencer when he points out that he doesn't have his Clarityn and he's allergic to almost everything: " Oh, no. You got allergies, Spencer, huh? I don't have the top two feet of my body !"
• Supermodel Strut : Bethany attempts to teach Martha how to strut in order to flirt with the guards. Success could be described as "mixed", at best.
• Swallowed Whole : Bethany is eaten by a hippo immediately after discovering she is in the body of an overweight middle-aged man. This doesn't stop the hippo from swallowing her whole, and she respawns a few seconds later decidedly not wanting to talk about what just happened to her.
• Take a Moment to Catch Your Death : Martha loses her first life in this fashion. It's only after the group escapes Van Pelt's goons via High-Dive Escape that she realizes she's been shot and her avatar disintegrates.
• Take Me Instead : When Van Pelt has Bethany at his mercy in the climax, Alex says these very words to Van Pelt, despite knowing full well he only has one life left. Van Pelt doesn't take the bait.
• Spencer laments that his doing Fridge's homework is the worst thing that could happen to him. One press of the start button later...
• Spencer says that it probably doesn't matter what characters they pick. They all get the ones most counterintuitive to their personalities.
• This is basically what caused Alex to get sucked into the game himself, as his dad found the board game on the beach at the start of the film and gives it to him. Alex open the box, sees that it is a board game, and discards it, saying aloud, "Who plays board games anymore?" The sentient Jumanji transforms itself into something more "current".
• Cake is one of Fridge's avatar's weaknesses. After accidentally eating some, he asks afterwards if he looks OK, and expresses relief that everything is fine. He then explodes and loses one of his lives seconds later.
• Thanks for the Mammary : Played with. The group realize they can access their player stats when Spencer presses his "enormous left pec". When it's Martha's turn the guys seem eager to watch her press her left breast, and Fridge even offers to do it for her. She ends up hiding the action with her arm to keep it from their sight.
• That Came Out Wrong : Martha says this when she gets in an argument with her gym teacher about how pointless gym class is. At the end of the argument, she says she doesn't want to waste her life as a gym teacher, before she remembers who she is talking to . The next we see her is in the principal's office, waiting with the other kids who got detention.
• That's What She Said : At the transportation shed, Bethany says she still can't see the jaguar statue on the map, which is weird because it's the most important thing in Jumanji, and it's huge, causing Fridge to drunkenly say, "That's what she said!" and start laughing.
• This Is for Emphasis, Bitch! : Mouse shouts, "Zoology, bitch!" when he saves the group by riding in on an elephant .
• Three-Point Landing : As expected in a team that contains The Ace and an Action Girl , both Bravestone and Roundhouse deliver these a few times in the movie, usually when they land after respawning.
• Timey-Wimey Ball : This movie changes the system of Time Travel established by the original. In Jumanji , when the game ended, time completely reset back to the point the first character entered, such that in the new timeline, the characters who'd entered decades later had no memory of the original timeline. They didn't remember having played the game or meeting the other characters at all. In this movie, when the game ends, the first character again goes back to his original entry point, but now the later-entering characters have Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory , so that they still retain knowledge of the game and the first character. This could actually be because of the evolving form of Jumanji — board games are always swept clean to be reset and re-played, but video games have save points .
• Toilet Humour : Bethany, in Shelly Oberon's body, played by Jack Black , has to be taught how to pee as a man, and loudly voices how awesome it is to have a penis.
• Jumanji is a lot more generous as a video game than it was as a board game. The board game version actually seems far more vindictively sadistic and cruel, and seems to be actively trying to prevent the players from ending the game. The video game Jumanji, while occasionally feeling like a troll, gives all the players additional skills and multiple lives, generates NPCs that give hints, and the hazards the player must overcome are within the realm of what one would expect from a linear RPG. Jumanji may simply be limited by its chosen medium, but it's noteworthy either way.
• Also applies to Fridge and Bethany. At the beginning of the movie, they're portrayed as a fairly standard Jerk Jock and Alpha Bitch , respectively; but they learn the errors of their ways throughout the course of the game, and become close friends with the others by the end.
• Totally Radical : Alex's use of outdated slang as well as referencing Cindy Crawford quickly clues the party in that he is Alex Vreeke, the boy who went missing in 1996.
• A few of the more memorable lines from the trailer aren't actually in the film. Also, the character select screen that appears in the trailer is different from the one used in the actual film — notably, Finbar's nickname really is listed as "Moose" in the trailer version, whereas in the film it says "Mouse" and Fridge just misread it.
• Alex is digitally inserted into a few shots that occur earlier than his introduction allows for, presumably to get Nick Jonas some more exposure.
• Tranquil Fury : Fridge and Spencer when Spencer respawns after Fridge pushes him off a cliff. Fridge tells Spencer not to call him a dumbass , to which Spencer tells Fridge not to push him, as he can and will push back.
• Trapped in Another World : Unlike the first film, which did pull people into the game, but only if they landed on a certain square; otherwise, the game would spew out dangers with each turn. This movie instantly has the characters sucked into the Jumanji world once they start the game. It could also be considered a version of Trapped in TV Land .
• Troperiffic : The movie bathes in using archetypes portrayed in genres ranging from from high-school stories to action video games, with its characters squarely fitting into well-established roles (such as Ruby Roundhouse being an Action Girl and Bravestone being The Ace ) as well as the extensive use of video game mechanics such as Welcome to Corneria , Poison Mushroom , Solve the Soup Cans , Video-Game Lives , and character status screens, among others.
• True Companions : In-Universe . In Jumanji's backstory, Dr. Bravestone saved Mouse Finbar from a warlord in the Peruvian jungle, and the two have been inseparable ever since.
• Twice Shy : Spencer and Martha have an unspoken attraction for each other even before the fateful detention and are completely unaware of the other's affections.
• Two-Fisted Tales : The in-game story is one. Extraordinary super strength from the adventurous, muscular protagonist , Ace Pilots , exotic locations, ancient ruins , mystical treasures, it's all there.
• Two Girls to a Team : Averted in the game — Ruby Roundhouse is the only female PC — but played straight with the students, as Bethany is a teenage girl even when she's in Shelly's adult male body.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change : The helicopter sequence. Every level prior was basically a Beat 'em Up Escort Mission , with the fighters protecting the support. Then a one-in-a-million shot damages the rotors, keeping the chopper from flying more than a few feet above the ground, so they have to maneuver around obstacles they can't go over until Bravestone makes repairs; a Vertical Scrolling Shooter . There's even an Advancing Wall of Doom in the form of stampeding rhinos, and the canyon they're trapped in keeps them from escaping left or right .
• Alex tells the others that mosquitoes is one of his weaknesses, implying he has more than one, but we don't find out what they are.
• The missing piece of the map is never found either.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight : Alex is nowhere near as freaked out as you'd expect when a board game magically transforms itself into a video game overnight.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom : Alex's father is unknowingly responsible for Alex becoming trapped in Jumanji, as he brought his son home the game from where he found it on the beach, and Alex dismissed it because it was a board game, causing it to turn into a video game cartridge and entrap him when he decided to play it.
• Video Credits : In a way — all the main actors and one secondary are shown next to icons representing the characters (the squirrel that scares Spencer, the hippo and snake that kill Shelly and Ruby, a mouse that is Fridge's nickname, the helicopter Alex flies, the scorpion that is Van Pelt's symbol, and a jeep next to Nigel).
• Video-Game Lives : Jumanji is a video game now, so each character gets three, symbolized by three tally marks tattooed on the inside of their left wrists. The players aren't sure what'll happen if they hit zero, but given the possibilites, they don't want to find out . They are apparently transferrable between party members, used when Bethany uses one of her lives to resurrect Alex after he dies due to a mosquito bite .
• Vile Vulture : Van Pelt has a pet vulture that acts as his scout.
• Violation of Common Sense : Ruby sacrifices her own life since she has one to spare, because resurrected players always fall from the sky, and because they never lose items when they die.
• Voices Are Not Mental : When the heroes are transformed into their avatars, their voices change to that of their avatars.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting : The Jumanji board game transforms into a video game upon being rejected by Alex, in order to draw him in.
• Water Is Dry : After the obligatory jump down a waterfall into a pool below and swimming out, the protagonists are completely dry only a couple scenes later, including their precious paper map. Certainly justified by the video-game environment.
• The Watson : Fridge, Martha, and Bethany don't know much about video games, allowing Spencer to explain various game mechanics to them and, by proxy, audience members unversed in video games.
• We Are Not Going Through That Again : At the end, the kids suddenly hear Jumanji's drums again. Smash Cut to them crushing the console with a bowling ball.
• Weaksauce Weakness : Fridge and Alex's avatars have some ridiculously fatal ones. Fridge's avatar explodes from eating cake, and Alex's avatar can be felled by a single mosquito bite.
• Nigel, the off-road vehicle driver at the very beginning, repeats his initial lines several times when the party members try to ask him questions.
• The cake salesman constantly shouts "Rations! Get your rations!"
• The boy at the market that directs Bravestone to the snake room.
• In-Universe , Smolder Bravestone and Russell Van Pelt used to be partners before Van Pelt became obsessed with finding the jewel and stealing it from the Jaguar's Eye.
• Spencer and Fridge too. They knew each other since the seventh grade, but then Fridge started using Spencer for his own ends because he felt he couldn't do his own homework, resulting in the two drifting apart ( to the point that, in the game, each of them costs the other one of his lives ). Unlike with Bravestone and Van Pelt, though, their friendship is rekindled through the Character Development of both of them.
• An in-universe one for Alex , when the teens reveal to him he's been trapped in the game for not a few months, but twenty years . Cue a silent but obvious breakdown as he takes it in.
• "Alan Parrish was here."
• One from Spencer/Bravestone when faced with Van Pelt . Spencer: I can't give you the jewel! ...Because I don't have it !
• Said by Bethany: "Where's Alex?"
• What a Drag : In the final level, Martha is fighting off the henchmen before she ends up being caught behind of their motorbikes by her ankle and dragged along the path, unable to free herself. Spencer saves Martha by whacking the henchman in the face with a tree branch, causing the bike to crash and allowing Martha to untangle her leg.
• The teachers and principal have a very good reason to be angry with the kids for their insolence or breaking school rules. Fridge gets the worst of it since he was coercing his childhood friend to do his homework, and he gets kicked off the football team.
• The team gets mad at Fridge for pushing Spencer off a cliff and wasting one of his lives. Spencer calls him out for it after he respawns, and later on has to sacrifice one of Fridge's lives to retrieve the jewel.
• Bethany calls out Martha for always judging her when Bethany has just undergone a breakup and was sucked into a video game where she just died. They then analyze each other's flaws, and Bethany tells her, " You're a total babe. Own it. "
• Alex gives one to himself for hiding in the jungle and being afraid to finish. Bethany comforts him .
• What Year Is This? : Played with, when the others ask Alex what year he thinks it is. It turns out he believes it's still 1996, and he's horrified when he learns he's been trapped in the game for over 20 years. Then it turns out that it's a little more complicated than that. Jumanji always ejects the players at pretty much the exact time they started the game, so he really didn't lose a second of his life despite however long he was actually there.
• Who's Laughing Now? : Part of the "Freaky Friday" Flip . Awkward nerds Spencer and Martha turn into smoking hot ass-kickers, while popular leaders Fridge and Bethany turn into the support crew. Downplayed in that Spencer and Martha initially freak out about this, and Martha's No Social Skills aren't erased. Fridge tries to assert his authority over Spencer, only for the Jack of All Stats to take the slap without flinching, then punches Fridge off his feet and into a wall without even trying.
• Fridge's weakness to cake comes into play when the very first food item he eats in the bazaar happens to be pound cake. He then explodes!
• Alex's weakness is getting bit by mosquitoes. Too bad he's stuck in a tropical jungle infested with them.
• And then played literally when Martha, who is weak to venom, has to enter a pit full of snakes to retrieve the jewel .
• A Winner Is You : On completion of the Jumanji game, you get a thanks and a handshake.
• Win to Exit : Four teens are sucked into a video game version of Jumanji, and have to complete the game in order to get out.
• A Wizard Did It : A lot of nonsensical elements in the movie can be justified with "they're in an old-school video game".
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? : Since he has an army, and more firepower, you'd expect Van Pelt could just kill the kids and take the jewel from their corpses whenever he corners them. But the game rules seem to dictate that he must take the jewel from the players while they live.
• The Worm That Walks : Russel Van Pelt seems to have become this as a result of removing the Jaguar's Eye. Multiple scenes have insects and arachnids either entering or exiting his body. When the players clear the game, his human body evaporates in the purifying wave, leaving behind a pile of bugs and vermin that scatter in the aftermath.
• Wrong Genre Savvy : Spencer realizes that the straightforward path to the Jaguar statue is a trap, so he interprets the clue "when you see the elephant, start the climb" to mean that they should start climbing out of bounds upon seeing an elephant statue. He gets scared by a squirrel and falls out of the tree, where a jaguar promptly kills him .
• Played straight when the group make it out of the canyon unscathed, but Fridge accidentally drops the jewel out of the helicopter and loses his second life in a Heroic Sacrifice so Spencer can retrieve it .
• Subverted later when Alex says how big a deal it is for him to finally make it through the canyon, only for a mosquito to bite him and almost die from it. Luckily, Bethany saves him by giving him her second life .
• Year Outside, Hour Inside : Alex thinks he's been in the game for a few months. When the teens realize this, they break it to him that it's been twenty years. While technically true, Alex gets ejected exactly when he started playing it, meaning he likely didn't even lose those few months he thought he did.
• You All Look Familiar : Some of the enemies look very similar to each other to represent cut-and-pasted assets in the game. In particular, the guards at the transportation shack differ only by their beards.
• The principal gives this speech to the teens, telling them that they're not bad kids despite their misconduct, before taking them down to the basement to clean it out.
• Bethany tells Martha that she shouldn't be ashamed of her looks and she should own them.
• Before the climax, Spencer tells Fridge that he doesn't feel he can finish the game, because he only has one life left. Fridge gives him a speech to the effect of this trope to inspire him.
• You Have Failed Me : Van Pelt kills one of his underlings when the heroes escape into a sewer. With a scorpion stored in his mouth, no less.
• Bethany's teacher has this reaction when the teen made a video call during a quiz.
• Fridge when he sees the strengths and weaknesses screen for his avatar.
• Bethany says this word-for-word during the second level when trying to outrun the biker gang and she and Martha end up at the edge of a cliff. They all have to perform a High-Dive Escape to get away, though Martha is shot and loses her first life.
• Your Head Asplode : Mouse's whole body explodes after he eats cake.
• You're Insane! : Bethany shouts "Are you out of your mind?" when Martha shouts at the others to jump off the cliff to escape the motorcycle goons.

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‘Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle’ Review: A Silly Body-Swap Comedy With Few Thrills

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I’m going to come out and admit it: I love the original  Jumanji . Sure, its CGI has aged terribly, and yes, it was pretty silly to begin with. But the Joe Johnston-directed 1995 movie made a fantasy children’s picture book feel genuinely thrilling to me as a kid, one where the perils of the jungle invaded the domesticity of the real world, where characters’ lives were at the mercy of the roll of the dice. The new  Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle , which is less of a direct sequel and more of a reboot – though it does reference Robin Williams’ Alan Parrish briefly – nixes that original premise to take us inside the game.

Directed by Jake Kasdan ( Walk Hard ,  Bad Teacher ),  Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle  opens in 1996 when a jogger stumbles upon the board game on a beach (slightly retconning the ending of the original, where the game ended up on a beach in France). He gives it to his teenage son, who’s too busy playing video games to care about it. To solve that problem (and in an effort to modernize this movie) the magical box suddenly spits out a knock-off Super Nintendo cartridge. Intrigued, Alex pops it in, then gets sucked into the game. Fast-forward to present-day when a foursome of high school stereotypes –there’s the gamer geek, the arrogant jock, the Instagram-obsessed cool girl, and the awkward rebellious girl – get stuck in detention together. There they find the old game, plug it in, and suddenly they’re teleported to the alternate reality of Jumanji.

Once inside the game, the foursome learn Jumanji’s fate is at stake – Bobby Cannavale plays a goofy bad guy vying for a magic stone to control the jungle – and that they have to save the tropical world in order to get back to their own. But  Welcome to the Jungle is less interested in the actual game of  Jumanji  and more concerned with the body-swap gimmick. The whole conceit of the film is placing teens in unlikely adult avatars. Spencer (played as a teen by Alex Wolff) is the timid nerd plopped into the chiseled body of  Dwayne Johnson’ s Dr. Smolder Bravestone, leader of the group. The towering footballer Fridge (Ser’Darius Blain) gets his height, and ego, chopped down in the short body of Kevin Hart’ s Franklin “Moose” Finbar, Bravestone’s sidekick. The reserved Martha (Morgan Turner) is placed into the crop top-wearing body of Karen Gillan ’s Ruby Roundhouse, nicknamed “Killer of Men.” And the biggest gimmick comes with Jack Black , portraying snobby teenage girl Bethany (Madison Iseman), known in the game as the bearded Shelly Oberon.

Part of the body-swap narrative is used for humor, much of which is inane and unoriginal. But putting teens in mismatched avatars also propels the film’s cheesy mantra (which multiple characters reiterate) that “you only have one life to live, but it’s about  how you live it that matters.” (They actually have three lives in the game, but whatever.) As much as I hoped the movie would take that somewhere a little bit deeper, it doesn’t. It ends with the sappy sentiment of a Disney Channel Original, where each of the kids walk away with a little more humility and confidence than they began with.

But its not all bad; in the amusing first third, we see each character acclimate to their new body and characteristics. The avatars come with their own set of specific strengths and weaknesses – one of Bravestone’s strengths is “Smoldering Intensity” (perfect for The Rock’s classic eyebrow raise), while Finbar’s weakness is cake. Johnson is playing the same buff badass he always does, but here it’s refreshing to see him struggle to embrace that, still a scaredy cat on the inside. It’s especially cute when Bravestone gives a courageous speech, then turns from his friends to mutter to himself “Don’t cry, don’t cry.”

Gillan is charming as she channels the mind of a self-conscious girl learning to find confidence, and she shares some sweetly empowering moments with Black’s Bethany. Hart is doing his usual comic routine of jokes about his stature, so if you’re a fan of his you’ll probably enjoy it; if not, it gets aggravating real quick. Black is fully committed as a teen girl whining about her missing iPhone, and as aptly as he mimics that type, the character’s whole schtick – a hairy middle-aged man acting effeminate and drooling over hot guys – closely rides the line of transphobia and homophobia. The material itself, and Black’s performance, aren’t necessarily offensive, but they operate under the (false) assumption that seeing a masculine-looking person behaving femininely and sexualizing other men should induce shock and laughter. While there are some charismatic moments from each, the fun of the body-swapping quickly fades, and the remainder of the movie recycles the same jokes. From there, it becomes a generic action-comedy.

The 1995 movie didn’t have rhinos chasing after a helicopter or a hero escaping jaguars on a motorcycle; it didn’t need massive, explosive set pieces to generate suspense and excitement. I still remember its action scenes, which were genuinely scary and exciting. What’s freakier than the hazards of wildlife invading your home turf, where giant jungle spiders terrorize your attic, stampedes wreak havoc on your local grocery store, and the possibility being slowly turned into a monkey, all outside your control? Not much. In that movie the jungle felt magical and terrifying. In the new movie, the jungle is hardly a character at all. That’s fine, but why call it a  Jumanji movie at all if the game is the least developed element?

I’m grateful  Welcome to the Jungle  attempted to do something different, but it’s missing what made  Jumanji, both the original movie and Chris Van Allsburg’s 1981 picture book, so fun. Kasdan’s film could’ve just been any generic survivalist action-comedy; slapping the board game onto the title is nothing but shameless branding.

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• DVD & Streaming

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

• Action/Adventure , Comedy , Kids

Content Caution

In Theaters

• December 20, 2017
• Dwayne Johnson as Spencer; Kevin Hart as Fridge; Jack Black as Bethany; Karen Gillan as Martha; Nick Jonas as Alex; Marc Evan Jackson as Principal Bentley; Bobby Cannavale as John Hardin Van Pelt

Home Release Date

• March 20, 2018
• Jake Kasdan

Distributor

• Columbia Pictures

Movie Review

When Spencer Gilpin is called into the principal’s office, he has a pretty good idea why: It’s because he helped a good friend.

OK, that sounds altruistic and bighearted. The truth is, he screwed up. He wrote a paper (or two, or three) for a guy who used to be his good friend back when they were both skinny nobodies living down the street from each other. Since then, Anthony “Fridge” Johnson has grown into a football hero worthy of his nickname and Spencer has, well, pretty much stayed the same stringy nobody that he always was. They rarely even speak anymore—except when Fridge needs a bit of scholastic help.

On this particular day, though, Spencer and his frowning former friend aren’t the only ones heading into the detention soup. There’s also a popular, pretty and completely narcissistic girl named Bethany awaiting the punishment axe. She was sent to the principal for putting selfies and in-class phone conversations above her teacher’s more studious recommendations. And sitting next to her is a too-smart-for-gym-class gal named Martha. She’s a bright individual who, by the way, Spencer has had a slight crush on for a while now.

After getting a little tongue lashing, they’re all sent to a small junk-clogged storage room to do a bit of heavy lifting and recycling as part of their collective penance. “You need to come to grips with who you are and who you want to be,” Principal Bentley says to the four of them. And, of course, cleaning up trash is the perfect way to facilitate that directive.

Little do any of them realize, however, that the principal is being somewhat prophetic. Oh, yes he is. For amid the piles of stuff in that closet, Fridge finds what appears to be a very old-school video game console with a cartridge labeled Jumanji jammed into its game slot.

Now, Spencer is a pretty well-versed video game guy. But he’s never heard of this one. Still, he figures it’ll likely beat ripping apart ancient magazines. So the kids plug the game into an old TV, flip the console on and choose their characters.

With a rain of sparks, some bright flashing lights and the thunder-like rumble of … Are those jungle drums? … all four teens are dematerialized and sucked into the little buzzing console.

But that’s not the most amazing thing.

What’s really incredible is the fact that they all find themselves in a deep, dank jungle. Spencer has somehow been transformed into a hulking, smoldering giant of a man: an archeologist named Dr. Bravestone. Fridge? Well he’s now in the short and diminutive body of Moose Finbar, a zoologist and weapons expert. Martha has become a Lara Croft lookalike named Ruby Roundhouse. But oddest of all is that fact that the gorgeous Bethany is now a tubby cartographer named Sheldon Oberon.

And before you can say, “What just happened!” Bethany/Sheldon gets grabbed by a passing hippo, slammed about and gobbled whole. Only to appear again, falling out of the sky, soon after that seeming demise.

Yup, this Jumanji place is going to take some getting used to.

And, it turns out, a little saving, too.

Positive Elements

The teens trapped and transformed inside this video game challenge gradually learn that they must work together, best a villainous bad guy and break a curse affecting the world of Jumanji. And along the way, these disparate adolescents (albeit clothed with decidedly adult avatars) become good friends. And they begin coming to grips with, well, “Who they are and who they want to be.”

Spencer, for example, realizes that his all-controlling fears and phobias are not always rational. Fridge learns some lessons about the value of friendship. Martha concludes that her formerly self-imposed shyness and isolation are quite limiting. And Bethany comes to grips with the fact that her social media selfie-obsessions didn’t really represent what she enjoys most in life. (In fact, at one point Bethany states, “Ever since I lost my phone it feels like my other senses have been heightened.”)

All the teens eventually understand that it takes more than muscles or beauty to make someone into an admirable person: It takes virtues such as trust, compassion and self-sacrifice.

Spiritual Elements

The Jumanji game is imbued with unexplained magic. We first see it as a board game that’s washed up on a beach (a nod to the original Jumanji film from 1996). But then the game magically transforms into a video game and pulls someone magically into its world. Twenty years later it happens again with the story’s heroes.

The video game jungle world the teens play through is all magically controlled as well. In fact, their main quest is to break a curse that beset the land after someone stole a powerful ancient jewel. This jewel gives the thief magical control over the myriad beasts and crawling creatures of the land. We also see bugs and spiders crawling around on him. For instance, a millipede crawls up and into the man’s ear; at another point, he opens his mouth, and a scorpion crawls out.

In addition, each of our heroes is given three “game lives.” Life gauges, represented by tattoos on their arms, decrease in number each time they are killed or lose a life in the game. After each “death” they disappear, and an unharmed version of their avatar regenerates and drops from the sky.

Sexual Content

There’s quite a bit of female skin on display when we meet Martha’s new Lara Croft-like avatar. Even she feels uncomfortable with the exposure and chooses to cover up a bit at one point—wrapping a borrowed jacket around her waist. Of course, Spencer’s muscular Dr. Bravestone avatar gets plenty of notice from the women in the group, too. “D–n, that is a man right there,” Bethany/Sheldon drools. But at least the brawny Bravestone keeps his shirt on.

When it comes to Bethany and her male avatar, though, there are lots of jokes, quips and visual gags tossed out concerning her gender-blurring body swap. The tubby male cartographer goes on and on about the new, uh, male appendage that he/she isn’t used to dealing with. That joke is revisited several times. And he/she also makes numerous gushing comments about the attractive males in their in-game party. When they meet another player named Alex, the guy gives an odd look to the short and stocky Sheldon after the character’s obviously girl-like reactions. Fridge tells Sheldon that the person behind the avatar is actually a very attractive girl. “If you were out there alive, you’d probably hit that,” he insists.

Later, Bethany/Sheldon gives Alex a lingering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. And after hugging him, other characters make surprised verbal note of Sheldon/Bethany’s clearly aroused (albeit off-camera) physiological response.

As far as Bethany’s real-world persona is concerned, we see her taking selfie shots that strategically expose skin. She states that her boyfriend likes it when she takes pics like that. “It’s the key to our relationship,” she says matter-of-factly. And when she reappears back in the real world, Bethany grabs her own breasts and sighs about how much she’s missed them.

Jokes are made about male genital size. Spencer and Martha kiss in both avatar and real-world form.

Violent Content

Jumanji is staged as an action-adventure game, so there are many thumping, pummeling, shooting and explosive scenes that unfold during our heroes’ jungle trek. A villainous explorer named Van Pelt sends scores of wild beasts after the teens in the game. We see several characters attacked by massive hippos, leaping and slashing jaguars, charging white rhinos and a thundering elephant. Some characters die in these attacks, though the violent deaths are always bloodless, and lives are subsequently regenerated.

The heroes are also set upon by Van Pelt’s motorcycle-riding thugs. These men shoot rifles and missile launchers. Some of them also fall from great heights. Fridge’s character literally blows up at one point.

Spencer and Martha spend several scenes flying into action and pounding various baddies. Martha’s Ruby Roundhouse is quite adept at “dance fighting” as well as leaping into the air and kicking foes in the chest and head. Spencer’s Dr. Bravestone, however, is much more straightforward: He uses duck-and-parry game moves to slam enemies into walls and literally launch them through the ceiling with massive uppercut shots. One man is killed via a scorpion sting to the neck.

Crude or Profane Language

Three or four s-words are spit out, as are a few f-word substitutes, such as “frickin’.” “H—” and “a–” both show up more than a dozen times each. And we hear a few uses of “d–n” and “b–ch.” Jesus’ name is misused once and God’s name is misused some 15 times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

One of Alex’s in-game skills is the ability to mix great margaritas. Spencer and Martha try the blended concoctions, but spit them out. Fridge, however, gladly knocks down several glasses of the stuff, getting a little tipsy in the process.

Other Negative Elements

Spencer’s mother reinforces his personal fears about the world around him. “Remember, the world is a terrifying place,” she tells him. There are a few urination jokes in the mix here, too.

When you’re trying to craft a fun movie-house distraction for the family, it’s probably smart to think beyond the typical film formula and come up with something rollicking, wondrous and imagination-filled. So it makes sense that this pic’s moviemakers decided to harken back to a fantasy romp from the ’90s with a recognizable name and comedic pedigree.

Just sprinkle in a handful of contemporary stars, stir in an updated plot twist, whisk briskly, and you’ve got a nice little matinee pudding with just the right amount of sugar and sprinkles, right?

Well, sorta. I mean, there’s broad, believe-in-yourself fun to be had here, but …

The problem is that while trying to craft something for your typical 13-year-old’s enjoyment, the new Jumanji writing team dumbed things down, and sexed things up, a little too much. The nerd-to-video-game-hero body-swap conceit at the core of things is cute. But it offers a limited pool of ideas and giggles. And the writers go back to that shallow jungle watering hole way too often. That’s especially true with Jack Black’s tubby-guy-who’s-really-a-pretty-girl character: He/she continually sashays about with girlish vim and trades a selfie-taking obsession for an obsession with his/her anatomically male parts. ( Ew , indeed.)

Add in a lot more foul language than you might expect in a movie built for the kids, and you’ve got a fantasy actioner that’s much less, uh, fantastic than it could have been.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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'Jumanji': Revisit everything you didnt know about the board game adventure

From would-be stars to unlikely connections, here are some fun facts about Jumanji.

Jumanji , director Joe Johnston 's adventure classic, is now streaming on Peacock , giving fans new and old the chance to revisit all their favorite moments from the wild movie about wildlife storming through a small New England town. It's been almost 30 years since the film first hit theaters, and shortly thereafter became a home video favorite for kids everywhere with its tale of a board game coming to life and wreaking havoc.

But even after all this time, we're betting there are still a few things you don't know.

RELATED: The best fantasy movies you can stream right now

Thankfully, SYFY is here to help, with a video outlining a bunch of fun, often surprising facts about the making of the film, and since a  Jumanji  rewatch is just a click away, we thought it might be fun to revisit all of those facts and learn (or re-learn) a few things about how the movie got to the big screen.

You probably know, of course, that  Jumanji  stars Robin Williams and Kirsten Dunst, but what you might not know is that the film could have starred Bruce Willis and Scarlett Johansson instead. You might also know that all of those stampeding animals in the film were created with the help of CGI, but did you know that the studio briefly considered actually trying to get a herd of rhinos to do some stampeding on camera?

Plus, what does  Jumanji  have to do with  The Polar Express ? Why is the same actor playing both Alan Parrish's father and the big-game hunter who steps out of the game and wreaks his own kind of havoc? And did you remember that, long before The Rock stepped up to revive the franchise, we got another  Jumanji  continuation in the form of an animated series?

Find out more about these fun facts and beyond in the video above.  Jumanji is streaming on Peacock right now .

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Jumanji (1995)

Jonathan hyde: van pelt, sam parrish, photos .

Quotes 

Hunter Van Pelt : [leveling his gun at Alan]  End of the line, Sonny Jim. Game's up. Start running.

Alan Parrish : [as Sarah runs into the room]  No...

Hunter Van Pelt : Aren't you afraid?

Alan Parrish : I'm terrified. But my father says you should always face what you're afraid of.

Hunter Van Pelt : [chuckles]  Good lad. You're finally acting like a man.

[aims his gun at Alan] 

Hunter Van Pelt : Any last words?

Alan Parrish : [Alan looks down and notices his game piece moving to the end of the board, after which the word "Jumanji" appears, reads it quietly]  Jumanji.

Hunter Van Pelt : Eh?

Alan Parrish : [slightly louder]  Jumanji.

[Van Pelt cocks his gun] 

Sarah Whittle : [runs to shield Alan]  NO, ALAN! NO!

[Alan and Sarah have finished the game; Sam re-enters the house] 

Samuel Alan Parrish : Forgot my speech notes.

Alan Parrish, 1969 : [runs up to Sam and hugs him]  I'm so glad you're back.

Samuel Alan Parrish : I've only been gone five minutes.

Alan Parrish, 1969 : [crying]  It seems like a lot longer for me.

Samuel Alan Parrish : Hey, I-I thought you told me you were never going to talk to me again.

Alan Parrish, 1969 : Whatever I said, Dad, I'm sorry.

[they hug again] 

Samuel Alan Parrish : Oh, Alan, I was angry, OK? I'm sorry too, son.

[pulls Alan apart and looks down on him] 

Samuel Alan Parrish : Look, you don't have to go to Cliffside if you don't want to.

[notices Sarah, who stands up; whispering to Alan] 

Samuel Alan Parrish : Let's talk it over tomorrow. Man to man.

Alan Parrish, 1969 : [whispering]  How about father to son?

Samuel Alan Parrish : Great.

[notices his speech notes] 

Samuel Alan Parrish : Hey, I gotta get going. I'm the guest of honour.

[walks towards the door; Alan turns to face him] 

Alan Parrish, 1969 : Dad?

[Sam opens the door and turns to face him] 

Alan Parrish, 1969 : Back in 196-- I mean, today in the factory, it wasn't Carl Bentley's fault. *I* put the shoe on the conveyor belt.

Samuel Alan Parrish : [sighs and nods]  I'm glad you told me, son. Thanks.

Alan Parrish, 1969 : Bye, Dad.

Samuel Alan Parrish : Goodbye.

[closes the door behind him as he leaves; Alan walks towards Sarah; his eyes widen in sudden realisation] 

Alan Parrish, 1969 : Holy smokes! Judy and Peter!

[turns to run] 

Young Sarah : Alan!

[Alan stops] 

Young Sarah : They're not there.

[shakes her head] 

Young Sarah : It's 1969. They don't even exist yet.

[hands Alan the crocodile and monkey pieces; Alan looks down at them sadly] 

Gun salesman : [Van Pelt enters his store]  What can I do for you?

Hunter Van Pelt : I want a gross of these.

[hands an empty elephant gun shell to the gun store salesman] 

Gun salesman : You know, they stopped making these in 1903.

Hunter Van Pelt : Damn. I shall need a replacement weapon.

[sets his old rifle on the counter] 

Hunter Van Pelt : Well, there's a waiting period, and you'll have to...

[sets down a bunch of papers for Van Pelt to sign] 

Hunter Van Pelt : ... fill out these.

[Van Pelt sets some coins on the table] 

Hunter Van Pelt : Or I could fill these out.

[gets Van Pelt his new rifle] 

Hunter Van Pelt : Now, anyone asks, you didn't get this here.

[Van Pelt looks through the scope of his rifle with his finger on the trigger] 

Hunter Van Pelt : You're not a postal worker, are you?

[Van Pelt looks at the salesman as if to say, "Excuse me?"] 

Hunter Van Pelt : [to Alan]  You miserable coward! Come back and face me like a man!

[Alan hurls a sword at Van Pelt, which halts him... briefly] 

Hunter Van Pelt : Not good enough, Sonny Jim! I'm coming, ready or not...

Alan Parrish, 1969 : [angry]  I guess I'm not ready for Cliffside then!

Samuel Alan Parrish : [at the door, shouts]  We're taking you there next Sunday! And I don't want to hear another word about it!

Alan Parrish, 1969 : You won't! I'm never talking to you again!

[Sam slams the door behind him as Alan tears up the brochure in anger] 

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Film Details

Brief synopsis, cast & crew, joe johnston, robin williams, kirsten dunst, bonnie hunt, bradley pierce, david alan grier, technical specs.

Because of the magically surreal and potentially lethal aspects of Jumanji, a board game that's intrigued its players for hundreds of years, few people want to play a second time. For you see, unless you complete the game, Jumanji takes over your world. Young Alan Parris discoverd the ornate Jumanji board in 1969, when he was just twelve. When he sits down to play it for the first time with his reluctant friend Sarah, he's transported into the jungle realm of Jumanji, disappearing before Sarah's startled eyes. Because Sarah is too frightened to finish the game, Alan remains trapped in the rainforests of Jumanji for 26 years until two new children, Judy and Peter, sit down to play the game in the attic of Alan's childhood home. If Alan, Judy and Peter can find the now adult Sarah, they have a chance to finish the game--or risk their hometown being taken over by the exotic denizens of the seemingly unstoppable force called Jumanji... forever.

Bebe Neuwirth

Adam hann-byrd, florica vlad, robin driscoll, peter bryant, leonard zola, annabel kershaw, laura bell bundy, brenda lockmuller, jonathan hyde, gillian barber, patricia clarkson, brandon obray, malcolm stewart, lloyd berry, sarah gilson, darryl henriques, cyrus thiedeke, gary joseph thorup, frederick richardson, james handy, thomas ackerman, philip edward alexy, roy t anderson, charles andre, david andrews, eric armstrong, mary arnold, okan ataman, sandina bailo-lape, stanton barrett, tom barwick, derek j baskerville, becky bates, greg beaumonte, david benson, george bernota, joe biggins, james d. bissell, tom blacklock, joanne bloomfield, sara bolder, scott bonnenfant, bob bornstein, tracey boulton, christopher boyes, steven bramson, carra braveman, barbara brennan, jill brooks, donald d brown, elizabeth a brown, robert bruce, adam bryant, norman buck, cheryl buckman, yancy calzada, lynne carrow, lauro chartrand, eric chauvin, doug chiang, robert clark, caitlin content, dave conway, sandy cooper, theresa corrao, robert cort, caroline cranstoun, chuck cross, gail currey, rory cutler, robert dalva, peter daulton, steve davis, christine derek, jim doherty, andres p dominguez, dean drabin, lisa drostova, tony eckert, teresa eckton, jenn emberly, les erskine, frank eulner, yuri everson, marty ewing, rick fearon, andre fenley, elaine fleming, james p flynn, james forsyth, corbin h fox, steve frakes, george gambetta, delaina-lu gamblin, brian gernand, bruce giesbrecht, alec gillis, michael ginsburg, susan goldsmith, gretchen goode, dow griffith, grant guenin, derek guiley, liam gadsby hailstone, jim henrikson, jonathan hensleigh, christophe hery, rebecca heskes, mark cordell holmes, james horner, david horsley, george hull, richard hymns, hiroshi kan ikeuchi, david jacox, daniel jeanette, james kagel, florian kainz, nathan kaproff, paula karsh, karen keener, tom killeen, bill kimberlin, pamela klamer, scott kroopf, michael kruger, b nick kuchera, tedd kuchera, beth kushnick, karen lafler, elizabeth lapp, nancy larman, william e lawrence, julija learie, charles leitrants, cynthia lewis, david linck, sherry linder-gygli, paul lougheed, nancy jill luckoff, john lundberg, michael p lynch, beth mackie, betsy magruder, josselin mahot, harish mandyam, paul michael marini, robert marty, bill mather, cotton mather, tony matijevich, sandra mayo, fausto mazzuto, dale mcbeath, sandy mccallum, terry mcewen, david mckeown, tim mclaughlin, patty mcreynolds, klaus melchior, yvonne melville, fred meyers, daniel michalske, mark s. miller, richard miller, mike mitchell, steven molin, jack mongovan, doug moreno, tim j morgan, claudia mullaly, dana mulligan, melissa mullin, shawn murphy, cheryl nardi, barbara l nellis, wendy newton, scott nicholson, jonathan null, wendy o'brien, brent o'connor, michael olague, glen pearson, marshall peck, miscellaneous notes.

Released in United States Winter December 15, 1995

Released in United States on Video May 14, 1996

Written and illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg, "Jumanji" won the prestigious Caldecott Award for Best Picture Book in 1981.

Began shooting November 14, 1994.

Completed shooting April 7, 1995.

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