Welcome to the Jungle
We took the newly crowned (as of this morning) Miss 14 out to the cinema last night to watch “Jumanji : Welcome to the Jungle”. She had no clue the tickets were booked – only that we were going out to dinner at the restaurant next-door to the cinema. I sprung the surprise on her halfway through dinner by way of a question:
“Ok, math genius – how long does it take us to get home?”
“About fifteen minutes?”
“So what time will we get home after dinner?”
“Well, if we leave here at about 8pm, we’ll be home by 8:15?”
“Hmm… I was thinking more along the lines of 10:45pm”
“But that doesn’t make sense.”
“It does if you’re going to see a movie after dinner.”
The look on her face was priceless. A grin crept across her cheeks shortly before she started asking what we were going to see. I think I got halfway through “Juman…” when both of our younger children did fist pumps, and starting telling us everything they knew about it from the trailer. Youtube has a lot to answer for.
I have to say at this point that I was not the biggest fan of the first Jumanji movie. If you take off your rose-tinted Robin Williams spectacles, it’s pretty much a travelling Robin Williams stand-up show, much like many of his other comedies. Jack Black suffers from the same problem – he’s almost a stereotype of himself, so the movie becomes about him rather than any plot he finds himself in the middle of.
Anyway – what did we think?
I can’t remember enjoying a movie as much in years. None of us can. I’m not going to laboriously describe the plot, or pretend to be some bookish movie-nerd doing a hatchet job on the finer points of cinematography. I’m just going to say that our faces hurt from laughing, and that I’ve never heard our kids (or myself and my other half, along with the other grown-ups in the theater) laugh out loud so often during a movie.
If you get the chance to go see it – here’s the trailer :