REVIEW: Danger, family fun and laughs aplenty in a hi-tech reboot of the Robin Williams classic

REVIEW: Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black and Karen Gillan lead a fun, family-friendly follow-up to the Robin Williams classic, with just the right amount of the ‘ick factor’.

THE original Jumanji, starring the late Robin Williams and a young Kirsten Dunst, was at the cutting edge of modern technology when it was released in 1995.

“There was a sense of: oh my god, look what they can do. It was a massive breakthrough,” recalls Welcome To the Jungle’s producer Matt Tolmach.

Two decades on, however, the movements of the computer-animals seem curiously jerky. Even the actors appear a little wooden.

RELATED: Karen Gillan’s Queen of the jungle

All of which points to the supreme timeliness of this big-budget reboot — which enriches viewers’ experience with the sort of detail contemporary animaters are now capable of.

In Welcome To the Jungle, snakes writhe, elephants wrinkle and rhinoceroses stampede.

Audiences see all the way back to a salivating hippotamus’s uvula when the supersized creature opens his mouth to swallow Jack Black in one quick gulp (the fact that we don’t actually witness the rotund comedian’s demise probably has just as much to do with the film’s PG classification as it does the limitations of CGI.)

Kevin Hart finds himself in the middle of stampede in Jumanji: Welcome To the Jungle.

The giant centipedes that crawl in and out of the facial orifices of Welcome To the Jungle’s villain, John Hardin Van Pelt (Bobby Cannavale), push the “ick” envelope for an all-ages audience.

The filmmakers have set out to create a genuine sense of danger in this jungle world — without actually traumatising younger viewers — and they have got the balance just right.

The original board game transforms itself into a video game in Welcome To the Jungle in an eerie prologue that feeds back into the narrative at a later point.

A bunch of students stumble upon the new version some years later after being instructed to clean out their school basement.

The nerd (Alex Wolff), the jock (Ser’Darius Blain), the bookworm (Morgan Turner) and the bimbo (Madison Iseman) metamorphose, by way of their avatars and some supernatural sorcery, into a musclebound explorer (Dwayne Johnson), his sidekick (Kevin Hart), a butt-kicking heroine (Karen Gillan) and a middle-aged cartographer (Jack Black) respectively.

Dwayne Johnson brings star power and firepower to Jumanji: Welcome To the Jungle.

While Central Intelligence co-stars Johnson and Hart confirm their odd couple comic chemistry in the sequel, Jack Black gets the juiciest body swap material to work with as Professor Sheldon Oberon, a middle-aged man with the brain of a teenage girl.

The characters’ task is simple — to escape the game, they must replace the jewel Van Pelt has stolen. Completing, however, will test each of them in a different way.

Jumanji: Welcome To the Jungle opens on December 26. Advance previews this weekend (December 23 and 24).

JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE (PG)

Three stars

Director: Jake Kasdan

Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Karen Gillan

Verdict: Game over

Originally published as REVIEW: Danger, family fun and laughs aplenty in a hi-tech reboot of the Robin Williams classic