I have a weird sense of humor, I guess. There are SO MANY of these awful multiplex comedies that leave me stone-faced and wincing throughout, and then a random one like, say,
Blockers will suddenly have me laughing hysterically throughout. Hey, we both think that
Top Secret! is a comedy masterpiece, and that's an opinion not shared by many.
The
Jumanji movies are "harmless", and I probably would have enjoyed them as a kid, but as an increasingly-jaded and grouchy adult, there's just nothing there to really latch onto...no warmth, no well-timed gags, no sly satire, just a lot of noisy annoyance. That a movie as slight as
Welcome To The Jungle could have made
that much is, I suppose, a damning indictment of the current cinema climate, where Hey-this-is-better-than-I-expected is good enough.
I just found it to be as generic a special effects demo reel as any made in the last decade, and the limp jabs it made at video games were, I suppose, intended to "excuse" how thin the plotting and characterization was. Were I a parent with kids in tow, I would have shrugged the movie off (again, it's not mean-spirited or laden with annoying toilet humor or instantly-dated pop-culture riffing), but as a grown man who just wanted a movie that would entertain
me, I found both films very lacking.
And the 1996 kid making "Jiggy widdit" references must have been a seer, because Will Smith didn't record that song until '98.
The F/X I'm sure were impressive for the day, but they haven't held up very well, either the CGI (those monkeys!) or the animatronics (those thrift-store spiders!). And, since the novelty of the F/X were all the movie had going for it back then, we're left with a nothing of a story with characters too busy playing the game to advance more noisy F/X sequences to have any sort of human reaction to whatever the hell's going on. Williams is stuck in a game since he was twelve, emerges to find out his parents are long dead...and doesn't really take more than a second to "mourn" before he's moving onto the next scene. 
And James Horner's score doesn't do much to add any much-needed emotion to the proceedings, playing as a grab-bag assortment of shakuhachi howls and thematic fragments lifted from every fantasy film he had scored for the decade preceding it. It's not as bad or hollow as some other CGI demo reels of the period like Casper (at least this film isn't loaded with toilet humor or dated pop-culture riffing), but it still isn't very good. I hope the new version is better than this. 
