IN THE DARK REVIEWS

Shelton is running its Movies in the Park series this summer, showing free-admission films every Friday from July 14 through Aug. 18 in Kneeland Park, so I'm running six weeks of reviews of each week's featured films, starting with the 1995 safari fantasy "Jumanji," starring Robin Williams.

"Jumanji" kicks off the city's movie series this Friday.

Among my fellow film nerds, director Joe Johnston gets a bad rap for being a solid yet unambitious meat-and-potatoes filmmaker, who's responsible for such favorites as "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" in 1989, "The Rocketeer" in 1991 and "Captain America: The First Avenger" in 2011.

"Jumanji" is based on the 1981 Caldecott Medal-winning children's picture book, written and richly illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg, that I read in elementary school. Young siblings Judy and Peter Shepherd (later played by Kirsten Dunst and Bradley Pierce) discover a board game that magically summons monkeys, lions, large spiders and an entire stampede of other wild animals into existence, along with an explorer and a monsoon.

Like "The Polar Express" and "Zathura" - both of which also began as children's picture books written and illustrated by Van Allsburg, before they made their way to the big screen - "Jumanji" was a wonderful read, but also too brief to fill an hour and a half on screen. To adapt "Jumanji" into a movie, screenwriters Jonathan Hensleigh ("Die Hard with a Vengeance" and "Armageddon"), Greg Taylor ("Prancer") and Jim Strain made its story multigenerational.

In the fictional town of Brantford, New Hampshire, in 1969, Alan Parrish is bullied by his peers, and browbeaten by his wealthy and well-meaning but emotionally closed-off father.

When Sarah Whittle, a girl his same age, stops by to return Alan's bike, after his bullies had stolen it, the pair starts playing the Jumanji board game that Alan unearthed earlier that day, but Alan disappears into the game's jungle realm, while Sarah runs out of his home screaming.

Fast-forward 26 years, and a recently orphaned Judy and Peter move into the long-abandoned Parrish house, where they uncover the Jumanji game, and inadvertently rescue from its exile a now-adult Alan (played by Robin Williams), whose relief at finally returning home proves brief.

Alan finds his family gone, his home inhabited by strangers, his father's factory an empty shell, his once-idyllic hometown suffering from widespread vandalism and homelessness, and the only other person who knows what actually happened to him, a now-adult Sarah Whittle (played by Bonnie Hunt), has spent the past 26 years shunned into hermithood for her unbelievable claims.

Worse yet, Alan realizes Judy and Peter have just joined the same game of "Jumanji" he and Sarah started in 1969, so now, all four players must persist through its perils to the game's end.

Yes, the special effects in "Jumanji" were charitably hokey even by the lesser standards of 1995, and its CGI monkeys stand out as especially artificial today, but what "Jumanji" doesn't get enough credit for is building a sustained level of suspense that remains appropriate for all ages.

As a boy who grew into manhood in a savage wilderness outside of modern civilization, Alan Parrish has matured physically, but remains emotionally frozen in childhood by his traumas, and Robin Williams is every bit as well-suited to this role as you'd expect, arguably doing a better job of playing "Peter Pan grown up" in "Jumanji" than he did in Steven Spielberg's "Hook" in 1991.

Narratively, establishing Alan as a survivor of the dangers of "Jumanji" allows Williams to guide the other characters, and set the tone for how seriously they should take each new threat.

Bonnie Hunt has spent too many years of her acting career relegated to playing wives, mothers and best friends of girlfriends, but she deserves credit for matching Williams' wounded energy with her portrayal of Sarah Whittle's psychic scars, as displayed in her sudden tone shift when she admonishes Alan, "Don't call me 'crazy,' " a triggering word for her after a lifetime of taunts.

Only a year after her star-making performance as Claudia in "Interview with the Vampire" in 1994, Kirsten Dunst is effortlessly effective as Judy Shepherd, recast from her minimalist appearance in Van Allsburg's book into a compulsive but convincing liar in the film, and while comedic troupers David Alan Grier and Bebe Neuwirth are given little to do, beyond reacting with shock to the absurdity of what's happening around them, they do so with amusing aplomb.

Special mention should be given to Jonathan Hyde, whose dual roles as Alan Parrish's stern industrialist father and "Van Pelt," the pith-helmeted colonial who has relentlessly hunted Alan through his exile in the jungle, recreates the number of "Peter Pan" productions that traditionally cast the same actor to play Captain Hook and Mr. Darling, father to Wendy and her brothers.

The arc of Alan's relationships with Peter, with Van Pelt, and ultimately, with his own father send the welcome message that perhaps the most important way that boys can choose to grow up is by growing out of inhibiting models of toxic masculinity that were forcibly passed down to them.

We still miss you, Robin.

Meanwhile, the first two episodes of "My Adventures with Superman" premiered on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim on July 7, and on the Mas streaming service July 8, so while I don't have room to offer a full review of that new series this week, consider this a strong recommendation, as I provide the following reminder of the city of Shelton's "Movies in the Park" coming up:

■ July 21: "Holes" from 2003, starring Shia LaBeouf and Sigourney Weaver.

■ July 28: "Shrek" from 2001, starring Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy.

■ Aug. 4: "The Mighty Ducks" from 1992, starring Emilio Estevez and Joss Ackland.

■ Aug. 11: "Space Jam" from 1996, starring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny.

■ Aug. 18: "Back to the Future" from 1985, starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
[email protected]