Jumanji

Based on a popular children's book by Chris Van Allsburg and directed by that "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" guy Joe Johnston, Jumanji is a calculated but very entertaining special effects extravaganza. [15Dec1995 Pg. 01.D]Read Full Review »

Eschewing warm, cuddly imagery just as Mr. Van Allsburg's book does, the film affects a strange, artificial style that has the invasive weirdness of "Gremlins" but none of the charm.Read Full Review »

Jumanji is cardboard Spielberg, a B-movie scrap heap of spare parts lifted from "Jurassic Park" and "Gremlins" and "Back to the Future".Read Full Review »

Jumanji takes approximately one-hundred minutes for four people to play a board game. The result isn't much more fun or involving than watching a few friends play Monopoly.Read Full Review »

Williams is hardly at his comically inventive best. And the script (adapted by Chris Van Allsburg, and a string of others, from his book) pursues the least exciting avenues possible.Read Full Review »

The film is a gloomy special-effects extravaganza filled with grotesque images, generating fear and despair.Read Full Review »

The script boasts more writers than the computerized menagerie's got megabytes, but they haven't come up with much variety or humor in what is essentially a string of catastrophes.Read Full Review »

Something bad happened on the way from the book to the movie. [15Dec1995 Pg. F.01]Read Full Review »

Director Joe Johnston ("Honey, I Shrunk the Kids") turns this fantasy into a mean-spirited exercise in terror.Read Full Review »

Director Joe Johnston's elaborately dressed kids' movie--about a board game that sucks its players into a perilous jungle overrun by lions, rhinos, monkeys, crocodiles and spiders--spends so much time on the how of special effects that it neglects the why of characterization.Read Full Review »