Jumanji review – startling 90s game fantasy adventure with Robin Williams in winning form

Williams is exuberant but controlled as elephants trample the town and a waterfall crashes down the stairs in bizarre Kiplingesque fantasy that still holds upThe Jumanji franchise has been enjoyably revived in the last few years, but the new reboot films don’t have the purely startling quality of the original fantasy-surreal adventure from 1995, now rereleased for its 30th anniversary. Adapted from a 1981 children’s picture book by Chris Van Allsburg, it starred Robin Williams in an exuberant, winning but notably controlled lead performance. This is an entertainment in the broad Hollywood tradition of Capra and Spielberg, with a boisterous touch of Peter Pan in that the stern father figure and the scary villain are both played by the same actor. But there’s something else, too, a dash of something that, if it were played straight, would be genuinely creepy. And actually, even played just the way it is, it’s still pretty creepy.Williams plays Alan Parrish, a guy who in his childhood of the late-1960s found himself marooned inside the bizarre internal world of a crazy Kiplingesque board game called Jumanji. A couple of recently orphaned kids, Peter and Judy (played by Bradley Pierce and Kirsten Dunst), chance upon this musty old game in the attic of their new house; they roll the correct numbers on the dice and release the crazed and disoriented Alan, whose strange and presumably jungle-dwelling garb is the only direct clue we will have to what his life has been like inside. Continue reading...

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