Jumanji (1995)

This movie didn't really need Robin Williams.

Not that there are very many movies that do (although Popeye and Aladdin benefited from his involvement), but just because you have a movie and you plunk down Robin Williams in the middle of it doesn't necessarily guarantee a good time for all.

Of course that wasn't always the case; in the beginning, Williams' rapid-fire comic timing and riffable nature made the TV shows and movies he was in entertaining for the fact that YES, as a matter of fact, he was quite picky about what he was in. Remember The World According to Garp and Moscow On The Hudson? After that point it seemed EVERYBODY wanted to have Robin in their films, even going as far as writing scripts tailor-made for his wise-cracking abilities. But then came mediocre (The Survivors), dumb (Cadillac Man) and downright embarrassing (Father's Day) dreck that did zero for his career, not to mention the success of said films. They could have had anyone in them. And after awhile, even Williams' effortless schtick seemed forced and heavy-handed.

It was about this time that Joe Johnston came into the picture. Joe was a director who started out as a special effects artist. His biggest success was directing Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, which itself was loaded with all kinds of effects concerning children shrunk down so small that lawns looked like jungles. But what could Joe want with Robin?

Awhile back, author Chris Van Allsburg wrote a charming little book called "Jumanji" about a couple of bored kids and their playing of a mysterious board game that made an entire menagerie of animals appear in their house, literally enveloping it in a huge jungle. Hollywood being Hollywood, someone got a hold of this property and proceeded to make it "hot" by adding Robin Williams to it. Now if I recall correctly, any parts of adults in the original book were small at best and the kids were the actual players of the game and the centers of attention. BUT...well, let's face it; if you're gonna shell out $65 million on a movie based on a kid's book with Robin Williams in it, you just don't have him put in a cameo. Do you? Apparently not. So Jumanji was now a Robin Williams vehicle. The kids? Ehh...they worked 'em in.

Here's how the plot went: it starts out kind of like the book, with two kids, a boy and a girl, playing the game back in 1969 and one of them, the boy, getting sucked down into the board game while the girl is chased away, screaming, by huge vampire bats.

...THEN, jump to 1995, where a woman (Bebe Neuwirth) and her niece (Kirsten Dunst) and nephew (Bradley Pierce) move into an abandoned house. Soon, the kids find the same game and start playing it...and who should pop out but Robin Williams! See, Robin is the boy that was trapped in the game all those years ago and...well, the rest of the story is filled with wall-to-wall (and I mean WALL-TO-WALL) special effects. Elephants charging, lions attacking, alligators snapping, man-eating plants crushing whole cars, vicious little monkeys leaping about, the whole bit.

Oh, and did I mention the biggest leap from the book? Everyone in this movie, just to open it up and make it, you know, "accessible" has more problems than any two episodes of "Dr. Phil". The 1969 children playing the game have self-esteem problems, the 1969 father (Jonathan Hyde) is a distant business-first martinet, the modern-day kids lost their parents in an accident, the modern-day boy is struck semi-mute becasue of it, a worker for the father in 1969 (David Allen Grier) has multiple levels of incompetence (implied racism, maybe?) as both a shoe factory worker AND as a modern-day cop, the 1969 girl grows into an eccentric recluse (Bonnie Hunt) who doesn't trust others because no one believes she was chased out of the boy's house by bats way back when, and.... Uh, did I tell you about the elephants?

But there in the middle of everything is Robin Williams. Something's terribly wrong here; he has no idea whether this is all supposed to be taken seriously or if it's all a big joke on the "Movies Based On Kid's Books" genre. One minute he's mugging after monkeys stealing a police car, the next he's somberly asking "Where's my dad?", after that he's trying to drive a car with Grier's incompetent cop handcuffed to it, and then he's clinging for dear life to a swinging vine as hungry lions swipe at him and crushing pythons snap at his heels.

So, is it a serious movie? Of course not; how serious can you take a movie where one of the characters is slowly turning into a monkey and Grier's inept cop is screaming and clomping around, flaccidly issuing orders that no one really listens to? And the animals; crushing cars, destroying houses, looking as CGI as all get-out. Not a thing can be taken seriously for a second, but the actors don't know that. I don't know if that's to their credit or not but it says something that they can LOOK like they're plausibly rescuing someone being sucked down into a hardwood floor.

I didn't like Jumanji for three standout reasons:

1) It completely blew Van Allsburg's book out of proportion; I know there has to be some padding in a movie where the source material is only a few pages long, but come on. Why introduce so many characters if you're only going to lock some in a closet, float others away down a flood on Main Street and simply stick others back in 1969 to be forgotten?

2) WAY too many CGIs. I can appreciate the fact that Johnston and associates worked hard in getting the effects onscreen and looking reasonably realistic, but Johnston ran into the same problem that George Lucas did with the Star Wars prequels: if you put in too much CGI, it's gonna draw attention away from your story and its characters. Though considering the story and characters they ended up with, maybe that was their intention.

3) Robin Williams. Galumphing around and trying to shoehorn a "realistic" performance here and there, he had NO reason to be here except to pick up a paycheck for a part that had no business being in the movie. So, why was he here? To sell tickets -

"Hey, let's go see that new Robin Williams movie!"

"What's the movie about?"

"I dunno...but it's got Robin Williams in it!"

You laugh, but movie-goers have seen movies for a lot less reason.

Not surprisingly, Jumanji broke the $100 million mark and made him yet again the king of movies. Of course, Williams would continue to make good movies (Awakenings, The Fisher King, Good Will Hunting) but there would continue to be missteps (Jack), miscalculations (Flubber) and gross misuse of his talents (Death To Smoochy). But hey, this is Robin Williams we're talking about; he's surely got another Garp or Aladdin in him.

...and probably another dozen Father's Days.