Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #168: Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.
I've also had the pleasure of writing about any number of Danny DeVito movies for another kind, much appreciated patron. It’s damn near impossible to calculate the amount of entertainment DeVito has given me as a cast member of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia as well as various movies and television shows.
At this point in my life I have probably watched more It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia than any other television show, including The Simpsons. The Simpsons is my all-time favorite show but I haven’t watched it regularly since some time relatively early in the George W. Bush presidency whereas my wife and myself watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia reruns compulsively.
It’s our television comfort food of choice, a timeless masterpiece that never wears out its welcome no matter how often you re-watch it.
Despite being a massive movie star and major-league behind the scenes Hollywood player as a producer, director and production company honcho, DeVito fit in perfectly with the cast of a modestly budgeted basic cable sitcom.
DeVito is over thirty years older than costars Glenn Howerton, Charlie Day and Kaitlin Olson yet he’s such a fearless, masterful physical comedian that he never seems particularly frail.
At seventy-six, DeVito has the physique and indestructibility of a cannonball. On It’s Always Sunny he’s forever one of the gang, a proud, unapologetic sleaze bag always eager to get his hands dirty playing the game as unethically as possible despite his age, height and wealth, not a portly, diminutive grandpa people need to worry about.
DeVito is a short, out of shape man in his mid seventies on a show full of fit, attractive young men and women in their forties yet he never stands out as more fragile or limited. You never worry about DeVito. He’s weirdly ageless in that it sure feels like he has been a poorly preserved yet strangely indestructible fifty-five year old for the last forty years.
So it’s way stranger to see DeVito play a grey and exhausted old man with an old man’s body in 2019’s Jumanji: The Next Level than it really should be seeing as how DeVito is pretty damn ancient these days.
Many franchises skew younger as they go along. Jumanji: The Next Level boldly travels in the opposite direction with a blast of AARP energy in its second outing courtesy of golden oldies DeVito and Danny Glover, who was famously getting too old for this shit thirty-four years ago in Lethal Weapon and is now the perfect age to play Jack Lemmon to DeVito’s grouchy old Walter Matthau.
DeVito plays Edward "Eddie" Gilpin, the grandfather of Spencer (Alex Wolff), a teenager who pines for the excitement of the events of the first movie so he re-enters the magical video game world of Jumanji.
Spencer’s teenaged pals reluctantly travel back to the world of Jumanji but Eddie and Danny Glover’s Milo Walker are sucked in as well in the form of dashing hero Dr. Smolder Bravestone (Dwayne Johnson) and brilliant zoologist Franklin "Mouse" Finbar (Kevin Hart) respectively.
Johnson is a wonderful comic actor with a surprising and impressive skillset but very distractingly fails to capture pretty much anything that makes DeVito so utterly distinctive and such a goddamn delight. Instead of capturing the Romancing the Stone star’s ineffable essence Johnson just kind of does a broad raspy old man character who seemingly has as much in common with Bernie Sanders or Larry David as he does DeVito.
When Johnson passes the character of Eddie off to Awkwafina later on in the film in a crazy sort of metaphysical relay race she doesn’t deliver a terribly accurate DeVito impersonation but she really gets in touch with her inner Danny DeVito and channels his grouchy magnificence very successfully.
Hart, in sharp contrast, completely nails Glover’s paternal warmth and twinkly charm as well as his cadences and mannerisms in a way that can’t help but call attention to how stubbornly off Johnson’s take on DeVito is. Hart delivers an impressive impersonation but it’s more than that: it’s a real character with depth, pathos and substance, a man who has lived and has the wisdom and wariness that comes with age.
#TheBoys!
Jack Black returns as Professor Sheldon “Shelly” Oberon, a portly, academic video game character who is pretty much all glaring weaknesses and limitations tightly strung together with neuroses. Sheldon is inhabited by a young black athlete in a development that has the potential to be offensive, an unseemly exercise in 16 bit Loqueesha-style minstrelsy, but largely avoids being problematic.
The Next Level offers a harrowing glimpse at the future that Liberals want, one in which distinctions like race, sexuality, gender, identity and species no longer matter and everyone is some combination of Danny DeVito, Dwayne Johnson, Akwafina and a pretty black horse.
Karen Gillian returns as Ruby Roundhouse, a dashing video game heroine with explosive martial arts abilities whose midriff-baring costume is a nun’s habit compared to the legendarily pervy attire of Lara Croft.
Gillian makes Ruby a legit badass, a digital warrior with the film’s most impressive moves and real agency. The always wonderful Rhys Darby returns as Nigel Billingsley, a NPC (or non-player character) in Jumanji’s video game world who gives our heroes crucial information.
Darby does such a wonderful job emulating the one-dimensional stiffness and cheesiness of secondary video game characters that it made me wish the film had made more of an effort to actually replicate the look and feel of old video games instead of featuring a parade of action set-pieces in the vein of a Super Nintendo adventure game.
I have not seen 2017’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. Usually, that’s not a problem, as sequels generally go out of their way to make things clear to even the dullest of audiences but this has a surprising absence of exposition, clumsy or otherwise.
Heck, I would have appreciated some manner of opening scroll, possibly featuring a burning map, to help clue me into what’s going on.
As with yesterday’s Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 entry, Trolls, I was pleasantly disoriented throughout much Jumanji: The Next Level. I didn’t go into it with a strong sense of who these characters were, beyond basic archetypes, so it was more than a little confusing when they begin further swapping bodies and identities and souls and everyone becomes everyone else.
I’m starting to think this fuzzy confusion is intentional, that it’s a feature, not a flaw, of shiny, spectacle-rich contemporary family fare that at a certain point the audience throws its hands up and concedes, “I don’t really know what’s going on and I don’t mind! In fact I quite enjoy it!”
I did not realize that Jumanji: The Next Level was a Jake Kasdan directorial effort until the end credits. I am a huge fan of TV Set and Walk Hard and while this is not in the same leagues as those cult classics I’m not surprised that with good material Kasdan can deliver a solidly funny big-budget blockbuster action comedy.
This feels unmistakably like gun for hire work as opposed to more personal, intimate projects like The TV Set or Zero Effect but as the son of legendary screenwriter and director Lawrence, whose impressive resume as a screenwriter include such staples of happy childhoods as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Jake is a second-generation consummate pro.
The younger Kasdan seems to have found his commercial niche as the director of hit mainstream comedies like Bad Teacher, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and now Jumanji: The Next Level.
The sequel grossed close to a billion dollars at the box office so we will undoubtedly be saying more of this gang. It’s always smart to be skeptical of remakes, sequels, second sequels and franchises but the new Jumanji movies have already disproven the conventional wisdom that remakes and sequels invariably suck twice.
If a talented filmmaker like Jake Kasdan is going to devote precious years of his career to a screamingly commercial series of CGI-heavy adventure comedies for children at least it’s one of the few spectacle-powered franchises that actually seems to know what it’s doing.
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