"Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle" - SPOILER ALERT

When I taught third grade, one of my favorite books to share with my students was Jumanji, by Caldecott Medalist, Chris Van Allsburg. I have never played the game, but my students and I always enjoyed the book. This is what sparked my interest in watching the movies, although long after I left teaching.

I watched the first "Jumanji" movie before I started reviewing films on my blog. For now, I will say that I really enjoyed it and was looking forward to seeing the next one that was released in 2017. As sequels often do not live up to their predecessors, I wasn't quite sure how much I would enjoy the second one. While "Welcome to the Jungle" had a bit of a different vibe, I enjoyed it equally as much as I did the first one.

"Welcome to the Jungle" is a sequel to "Jumanji", and yet it isn't. "Welcome to the Jungle" picks up where "Jumanji" left off. At the end of "Jumanji", the game was thrown into a river and it washed up on a beach. At the beginning of "Welcome to the Jungle", the game is found by a father on a beach. He brings it to his son, and so the story begins again. It begins in 1996, but soon fast forwards to twenty years later. These two time periods are relevant as the story unfolds, and a bit mind-boggling at the end of the movie.

"Welcome to the Jungle" has different characters and actors than the first one did. This movie has an updated vibe to it in that the board game becomes a video game, and yet it brings me back to older movies like "The Breakfast Club" where, as in "Welcome to the Jungle", the students are all serving detention for various reasons. If I had known detention could be that much fun, I would have done something to earn it when I was in high school. Oh, well.

In "Welcome to the Jungle", once the four students serving detention find the game (20 years after it was found on the beach by the father of another teen), start it up, and choose their characters, they are immediately sucked into it. They become the characters they choose, and so when they are trapped in the game, the once teens are now grown adults. There is also a gender twist that confused me at first, but ended up working really well. It was a very clever idea that added another layer to the movie. Along the way, they discover a missing link, hence the relevance to 1996. Together, they work to complete the game.

The end of the movie is interesting and makes one wonder about the passage of time. It's fun to ponder how that could have happened, but it's best to just accept that maybe some things are simply not meant to be understood by everyone. Not everything has to make sense to be enjoyable. It is a fantasy, after all.

It's a fantasy, with some humor in it, but it's also a story about self-discovery, self-acceptance, and recognizing that we only have one life to live in this world (so we better make the most of it). The movie itself is good, but the actors and actresses are truly what made it worthwhile. I can't think of any other actors and actresses who could have pulled off the main characters' roles as flawlessly as they did.

The way this movie ends, it seems like there can't possibly be a "next level", but there is. And I can't wait to see it!