Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

Tropic Blunder

Grade: C +

Director: Jake Kasdan

Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Karen Gillan, Nick Jonas, Bobby Cannavale, Alex Wolff, Madison Iseman, Ser'Darius Blain, and Morgan Turner

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 59 min.

It’s probably giving the makers of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle too much credit to note that a film whose premise revolves around kids magically occupying adult bodies includes a brief appearance by the son of Tom Hanks, the star of Big almost thirty years ago. That said, this sequel—undoubtedly named after the Guns N’ Roses song once the producers obtained the rights to play it over the closing credits—is a lot like Colin Hanks: a capable progeny that nonetheless pales in comparison to its popular predecessor.

The Jumanji board game in the 1995 film, which starred Robin Williams, is replaced with an Atari-esque video cartridge, exhumed by a quartet of high schooler archetypes doing detention: Spencer (Alex Wolff) is the nerd, “Fridge” (Ser'Darius Blain) is the burly jock and Spencer’s sometimes pal; Bethany (Madison Iseman) is the pretty, solipsistic It girl who is emotionally attached is nothing except her cell phone; and Martha (Morgan Turner) is the brainy bookworm.

Unlike the 1995 original, where the game’s contents were unleashed into the real world, here the teens are teleported into the Jumanji video game, where each is assigned an avatar. Spencer is a strong, speedy explorer name Dr. Smolder Bravestone, played by Dwayne Johnson. “Fridge” is reduced to Bravestone’s diminutive sidekick (Kevin Hart), with a penchant for zoology and a weakness for cake. Martha becomes a comely commando (Karen Gillan), while Bethany becomes Professor Sheldon Oberon (Jack Black), a portly cartographer and, well, man.

Most of the chuckles come compliments of the age, gender, and persona-swapping gags. Johnson is convincing as a young nebbish suddenly coping with the body of a muscle-bound hero, while Jack Black exudes the superficial silliness of a self-absorbed teen girl. Hart is hilarious as the BMOG suddenly cut down to size. Even Nick Jonas pops up as another kid caught in the game to demonstrate that, indeed, Nick Jonas can carry a role.

Still, the premise and set pieces are uninspired and instantly forgettable. Any sticky situation is quickly resolved, and any sense of danger is minimized by the multiple lives each player possesses, a la a video game. Moreover, the film needlessly sacrifices its PG-rating for the sake of stray profanities and sexual allusions scattered throughout, particularly revolving around Bethany’s male anatomical self-discovery. Whatever marginal comedic value these off-color moments hold don’t befit the wide target audience for a holiday season release.

The camaraderie between the characters and cast carries the film. Otherwise, while the original Jumanji sprang on a fictitious board game, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is more of a bored game.

Sex Tape

Pros leave the roller skates on

Grade: C –

Director: Jake Kasdan

Starring: Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel, Rob Corddry, Ellie Kemper and Rob Lowe

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 34 min.

The presence of Rob Lowe in a movie titled Sex Tape is as witty as this flaccid farce gets—Google “Rob Lowe sex tape” if you’re too young to get the reference. The film even momentarily goes next level when the setting shifts to madcap sequence inside the mansion of Hank, Lowe’s character, which is adorned with a series of paintings featuring Hank’s face drawn into classic Disney movie stills, including The Lion King, Pinocchio, and—yep, you guessed it—Snow White. [Google “Rob Lowe Snow White” if you don’t get that one, either.]

A bawdy bore, Sex Tape is the unsexiest movie about sex, and that’s saying something considering one of its derriere-bearing stars is Cameron Diaz. Diaz reteams with her Bad Teacher director Jake Kasdan and co-star Jason Segel as a couple, Jay (Segel) and Annie (Diaz), whose red hot college romance has transitioned into a decade of familyhood and movie martial malaise.

In an effort to stoke their erstwhile sexual sparks, Jay and Annie decide record their three-hour romp through “The Joy of Sex” on Jay’s iPad. Unfortunately, Jay forgets to delete the video, and utter contrivance intercedes when a syncing app uploads the risque recording to a passel of other iPads gifted to various friends and family.

In the real world, an app able to accomplish such an online syncing process would also be capable of deleting uploaded files remotely from their source. Of course, that process would take about 30 seconds. Instead, Jay and Annie frantically spend all night—and the bulk of the film—chasing down the now tawdry tablets, including a visit to best friends Robbie and Tess (Rob Corddry and  Ellie Kemper, a much funnier pair than the lead duo) and Hank (Lowe), a CEO hoping to buy Annie’s mommy blog as the face of his family friendly company.

Moreover, when someone extorts Jay by threatening to upload his video to an online porn website, a sane person would contact the website and formally request them to block and/or remove the improperly obtained recording. In Sex Tape, Jay and Annie pile their moppets into the family SUV, then use it to ram their way into the site’s corporate headquarters in order to take an axe to its servers.

There’s precious little spark between Segel and Diaz, and most of the script is the sort of forced shock dialogue that actually makes us think less of our protagonists. There’s not a truly funny or believable moment in all of Sex Tape, down to our eventual glimpse of the actual tape, which was ostensibly filmed with a stationary iPad yet somehow contains multiple camera angles. Well, there’s one believable moment: when Hank and Annie share lines of cocaine, Lowe and Diaz’s portrayals suggest some prior personal experience. Just Google “Rob Lowe and ….,” well, you get the idea.

Bad Teacher

There's Something About Daisy Duke

Grade: C –

Director: Jake Kasdan

Starring: Cameron Diaz, Jason Segel, Lucy Punch, and Justin Timberlake

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 29 min.

Lately, Cameron Diaz is known more for the men she dates than the movies she makes. Over her 16-year film career, it’s hard to tell the difference between versatility and never quite finding a niche. She has starred in romances (My Best Friend’s Wedding; The Holiday), dramas (Gangs of New York; In Her Shoes), action films (Charlie’s Angels; Knight and Day), psychological thrillers (Vanilla Sky; The Box), animated movies (the Shrek series), and fantasy fare such as Being John Malkovich and A Life Less Ordinary.

Still, it is comedies like There’s Something About Mary and The Mask where Diaz made her name, so it would seem natural for the now 38-year-old actress to return to her familiar stomping grounds with Bad Teacher. The passing years have done little to dim Diaz’s outside personality (a welcome trait for this genre) and it helps that she doesn’t look like she’s aged a day over the past decade.

However, it’s another black comedy, the similarly titled Bad Santa, with which Bad Teacher shares its comedic DNA. Unfortunately, that connection predominantly involves irreverent, irredeemable and unlikable protagonists we’re asked to cheer for against all sense of logic and decency.

After getting dumped by her rich fiancée for being a gold digger, the suddenly cash-strapped Elizabeth Halsey (Diaz) reluctantly returns for her second year teaching at John Adams Middle School. Elizabeth is hostile to her students and coworkers. She spends her nights – and often work days – getting drunk and high, and then sleeps off the hangover by babysitting her seventh graders with school-related films like Stand and Deliver, Lean On Me and Dangerous Minds.

Elizabeth also decides that her road to happiness includes breast enlargement surgery. Unable to afford a boob job on a teacher’s salary, she dons her daisy dukes to raise money for the school’s annual car wash fundraiser just so she can skim the profits. She solicits bribes from parents in exchange for giving their children good grades. She makes advances towards Scott (Justin Timberlake), a rich, feckless substitute teacher with a predilection for cardigans and dry humping. And, when she learns a bonus for the teacher whose class has the highest end-of-grade test results, she drugs a school administrator in order to steal the answer key and use it for test prep.

The most devious trick of Bad Teacher is slyly luring the audience into rooting for Elizabeth’s foul-mouthed misdeeds to win out over her nemesis, Amy (Lucy Punch), a holier-than-thou coworker whose main transgressions are taking pride in being a good teacher and ferreting out Elizabeth’s actual misconduct.

That unsavory sleight-of-hand, together with director Jake Kasdan’s send-up of classroom pieties, isn’t enough to compensate for the lazy scatology and off-color one-liners about blacks, Jews, gays, and “Orientals” that are offensive principally because they lack any satirical context. Only Jason Segel gets good quips as Russell the sardonic gym teacher, whether he’s taking Elizabeth down a peg as he doggedly pursues her affections or arguing with a student that Michael Jordan was a better basketball player than LeBron James. Otherwise, the wayward jokes, like the film’s disjointed storyline and superficial characters, lack wit or rhythm.

In the end, the only “nice” thing Elizabeth does is salvaging the cred of the class nerd (Matthew J. Evans) by starting the false rumor that she caught him groping an eighth grader. No matter – the only apple this Bad Teacher deserves is one with a worm in it.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com - http://goo.gl/ylpTm