Never mind that these kids aren’t even in college yet. But as they get more involved in game play, they turn over what their principal said, and find the ostensible truth in his hackneyed words. Maybe he’s right: Maybe they should start making decisions that will make them more like the young adults they aspire to be rather than the immature pre-persons they currently are. Bentley’s charges initially roll their eyes, like any good adolescents should. Bentley, Jackson’s preachy character, tells our heroes that they each need to think about who they really are, since they only have one life to live, etc. All four teens are lectured by their high school principal (Marc Evan Jackson) before they even enter the game world of Jumanji (also the name of the video game’s jungle). To understand why Welcome to the Jungle is as obnoxious as it is, you first have to look at the way its four hormonal characters are introduced. By trying to teach kids how to feel good about themselves, Welcome to the Jungle winds up making the original 1995 film look good simply for being a modestly successful Amblin-style Spielberg clone. This is the kind of movie that frequently tells you, through otherwise endearingly cornball dialogue, what it’s about - kids: you can become your best self even if you don’t like who you are now! - while practically endorsing another set of values entirely (kids: you can only feel good about yourself by role-playing as superficially attractive characters whose only positive qualities are skin-deep!). But this film struggles as much as it does because its creators rely implicitly on coming-of-age cliches and teenage stereotypes. One should arguably not expect great warmth or delicacy from a kids’ film with a Guns N’ Roses song in its title. Unfortunately, the makers of Welcome to the Jungle don’t do anything thoughtful or even clever with this fun body-swap premise.
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