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.
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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.
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