The reason I called it "Ju-bad-ji"

My friends and I have a clever way of indicating when we think a movie is bad, one that started years ago and has unaccountably held on to the present day. And by “clever” I mean “incredibly lame but it consistently makes us laugh.” And that is to replace a word or even a syllable of a word in the title with the word “bad.”

Example: “Wild Wild West was Wild Wild Bad.” Or maybe “Wild Wild West was Bad Bad West.” I think you get the idea.

Sometimes we’ll get even more clever and use a synonym for “bad,” one that perhaps is a better phonic match for whatever syllable we’re replacing. Let’s call it growth over the years.

One of the first examples I ever remember, though, was when I saw Jumanji and made this pronouncement about its poor cinematic quality: “Jumanji? How about Ju-bad-ji.”

I’ve continued to not like Jumanji whenever I think about it, though my one viewing remains sometime in the late 1990s, likely within a year of when it was released. I’m quite sure I did not see it in the theater, but I think I also would have prioritized it within a year or two. Anyway, it’s been 20 years, but what you felt about a movie tends to be something that sticks with you. And I thought this one was bad, as memorialized in my clever (there’s that word again) alternate title for it.

But in the last six months, my relationship with the Jumanji brand has undergone a change. You’ll remember from this post that my sister gifted my kids the storybook, complete with audio CD read by Robin Williams, for Christmas. Probably not coincidentally in terms of the timing of her gift, there was also a Jumanji reboot released. We both opened the present from her and watched Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle while we were on a five-day holiday down on the Mornington Peninsula over New Year’s. The kids loved the movie and became addicted to the storybook, or rather, its audio version. We’ve since listened to Williams read that story so many times that my wife and I have a dozen of his line readings that we find particularly snort-worthy – not because we like the line readings, but because we find them kind of ridiculous. (Sorry Robin – R.I.P.)

The next logical thing to do was to watch the original cinematic adaptation of Chris Van Allsburg's story with my kids. I knew it wasn’t a whole lot like the book, which plays out in only 18 minutes on the CD, and that’s with some pregnant pauses and filler to stretch it out a bit. But I also knew it was possible they’d love it, and that I had misjudged it. I knew those younger than me consider it a childhood classic (I was in my early 20s when it was released in 1995), so maybe I was missing something, or just at the wrong age to appreciate it. Maybe seeing it through parent lenses would soften my hard heart.

Nope.

We finally watched it on Monday, which was a holiday to celebrate the queen’s birthday (two months after her actual birthday). We logically might have watched it much sooner, as it’s been available streaming on Stan all year. Our delay was because my wife wanted to be involved, but is always the one with the schedule least likely to allow it.

When we had to cancel some other plans for the day because my kids were both getting sick, I thought we’d finally landed on the right day for Jumanji. My wife seemed to agree, but then eventually realized she’d be better served using those two hours when others were occupied to catch up on some work. Still wanting her to be involved, I told her we’d try to find something else to watch instead – and she accepted that offer.

Disappointed, I listlessly poked through the other streaming options, options we’d already scrubbed pretty well. The kids are at ages where their tastes are pretty divergent. The seven-year-old won’t watch anything that he finds too baby-oriented, and the four-year-old wants things that are more baby-oriented than even I want to watch. There are a lot of classics right in the middle of those two extremes, but we’d either already seen them, or neither of them wanted them.

I couldn’t believe I was trying to sell them on the trailers for a couple movies I hadn’t seen (3 Ninjas and Shark Tale), or one I’d seen and liked, but didn’t look like it held up too well while watching its trailer (Antz). The afternoon seemed doomed.

But then I pulled a bit of a fast one.  

Jumanji is one of about a dozen titles that are writ large at the top of Stan's children's section, movies Stan is trying to push on you as some kind of featured title. You can scroll through many more if you drill down to the smaller rows of more specialized options, but the top of the page splashes the titles and artwork of the featured movies one per page, with a greater than or less than symbol on either side for you to click to get the next one.

I didn't have to actually suggest Jumanji ... but what if we "innocently" scrolled past it while considering our options, and the kids demanded it?

And that's exactly what happened. I "innocently" went and reported this outcome to my wife, who relented on her wish for us to save it -- probably because she knew deep down that the next time a situation like this arose, she'd probably opt out again.

Well, I think I saved her a pretty tedious 100 minutes at the movies. Jumanji was about as bad as I remembered it, and the two-star rating I'd given it (retroactively) on Letterboxd was more than fair.

There are any number of shortcomings I could linger on, but I'll concentrate on just a few:

1) The film has an odd ineptitude at how to raise the stakes. As the four players (two kids and two adults) work their way through an interminably protracted game, the jungle beasts that are becoming real don't actually increase in magnitude as the game moves along. In fact, the oversized mosquitoes that emerge first from the game are, in a way, some of the game's most threatening creatures. A few days later I've already blocked out the sequence that the other threats arrive, but they don't escalate in any obvious way, such that it feels like a bunch of disconnected set pieces strung together only by the characters occasionally returning to the board for someone else to play their turn, breathing deeply and looking at each other ominously. And there are like eight of these episodes, so each time it feels a little less like anything matters.

2) The visual effects. Cruel to dwell on these when obviously they would become dated within a short time, but the effects in this movie are bad. We would expect that of the visual effects, which were cutting edge for 1995, but the thing I might have found most distracting was the practical effects involved in the animatronic lion. I figure there should have been a way to train a real lion to do the fairly minimal things it needed to do, without endangering the actors. This lion looks like shit. Here:

I don't know, maybe you can't tell from that.

3) This one may be on me, but this movie is pretty inappropriate for kids my children's age. The main character, whom Williams plays as an adult, is Allen Parrish, the boy who got sucked into the game back in the 1960s. The effect of him being sucked into the game disturbed me even when I was in my 20s, so I can only imagine how it must have chilled my kids, though they didn't say anything about it. But that isn't really my bone of contention about this. Because no one believes that Allen got sucked into the game, a story develops that his father killed him "and chopped him into little pieces." The possible death of a child is a big enough deal; his dismemberment into hundreds of chunks of human flesh and viscera is quite something else.

4) And then there were just the little details that bothered me. When Allen is beaten up by bullies at the beginning, he emerges from this 30-second skirmish with a full-on black eye. Don't you know, Jumanji, that bruises like that only develop after the initial blows have had the chance to settle in?

One bonus thing that made me a bit uncomfortable: David Alan Grier as the town police officer. His portrayal is not actually "wrong" in any respect you could easily identify if you were trying to provide evidence in a court of law. But there's an awful lot of bugging out of eyes and screaming. Just didn't feel all that racially sensitive to me.

The kids loved it though. Well, liked it anyway.

I guess now I'll be due for my second viewing of The Polar Express, to see which artificially distended version of a beloved Chris Van Allsburg storybook actually fares worse.