Jumanji: The Next Level

In Jake Kasdan’s 2019 sequel the reshuffle happens to the players, not the game: the same avatars are occupied by the wrong people. Dwayne Johnson doing Danny DeVito and Kevin Hart doing Danny Glover is not one gag but the load-bearing structure of the first half. Producer Hiram Garcia has described Johnson spending time with DeVito and working from recordings of him reading the lines. That choice decides who should watch. Anyone who skipped the 2017 film will spend the opening half hour working out who is inside whom instead of laughing; viewers who know the cast get the actual payload. Kasdan also reaches back to the 1995 picture by folding Nora’s restaurant in without continuing it. The new regions are desert and snow; the rules do not move. Photography began on 21 January 2019 and ran through Blackhall Studios outside Atlanta, New Mexico, Calgary and Hawaii before wrapping on 11 May. The mandrill chase across the rope bridges was among the hardest effects work: with no footage of aggressive mandrills to copy, Weta Digital built a separate system to animate the troop in bulk. Violence is constant and bloodless: dying belongs to the game’s life counter. Not for a viewer who wants those rules extended; for one willing to treat an impersonation as the subject.