instal the new for windows Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

The body-switching gag threatens to wear out its welcome quickly ( hah ha, the scrawny nerd looks like Dwayne Johnson now, and the awkward girl has washboard abs!), but the actors take their assignments to play teenagers so seriously that the film surfs along on a wave of poker-faced earnestness, mixing moments of pathos in with its super-broad slapstick. There are supposed to be five characters in the game-space, though, and we meet the fifth in due time: Alex Vreeke ( Nick Jonas), who is introduced as an energetic teenager in the film’s 1996 prologue, only to get sucked into the game and become The Local Missing Boy whose endlessly grieving family still lives in their now-decrepit house. Once they end up inside the Jumanji videogame, these same characters are played by Dwayne Johnson (as Spencer the nerd) Kevin Hart (as Fridge the jock) Karen Gillan (as the super-fit avatar of Martha), and Jack Black, of all people, as Bethany.

The protagonists here are Spencer ( Alex Wolff), an earnest nerd Spencer’s onetime best friend Fridge (Ser’Darius Blain), a football star who ends up grounded after authorities realize Alex wrote a homework assignment for him Bethany ( Madison Iseman), a classic snotty Heather-type who’s addicted to her smartphone and takes selfies constantly and the bookish, socially anxious Martha ( Morgan Turner). (In the original film, the titular diversion is an old-fashioned board game, just like in the source material, Chris van Allsburg’s popular children’s book.) It has enough twists and surprises to pull viewers along, despite the fact that writer-director Jake Kasdan’s story (co-written with four people) is ultimately not much meatier than the one from a 1990s videogame that the characters end up inhabiting after getting sentenced to a “Breakfast Club”-type detention at school. That description makes the new “Jumanji” sound like a cash-grab, and in lot of ways it is-studios are so enamored with the notion that pre-existing intellectual properties are box office insurance that they’re far more likely to greenlight this than something genuinely new, even though exactly no one has spent the last two decades saying, “I wish somebody would make another ‘Jumanji.’” At the same time, though, this is a likable, funny diversion, and sometimes more than that.

Instal the new for windows Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle