Trailer: Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is an old video game

With some Black guy, big Johnson, little Hart, and I’m not Karen

Someone, no I won’t name names, wrote a damned fine article when the Jumanji sequel revealed a first look image back in September. All right! You caught me. It was me who wrote said inspiration. Let’s cease with the accolades and get back to the reporting. Now, Jumanji 2 (as we affectionately called it) is Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, and if I’m to believe the trailer, I guess that’s because the entire movie is scored to the Guns N Roses classic “Welcome to the Jungle”? Peep the trailer and then keep reading, friends.

Where to begin? Choices, choices, choices. Let’s break this down scientifically, by using bullet points:

• This movie was half a mindless twit away from being called Jumanji: In the Jungle and scored to Billy Joel’s “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
• The filmmakers clearly didn’t let outcries of sexism sway any of their decision making. In fact, they seem to have doubled down on pervasive stereotyping: women who as they get hotter, burn more and more of the clothing off their body–that makes sense–it’s science.
• The movie has little to do with its predecessor, apparently.
• Why all the subterfuge to get the four stars together as a cast? Was the only perceivable way these people could be lumped together to make them ‘avatars’ from a video game created by four equally different high-schoolers? 
• Now with motorcycles: hip.
• Yes, The Rock has muscles, we caught that.
• Yes, Karen Gillan looks wonderful as Tombraider, who’d have thought.
• Robin Williams may be rolling in his grave (too soon?).
• Nick Jonas is in this? What the hell?
• Have we come so far since 1995 that a board game can’t be used as a plot device? I get that it’s more restrictive than the open play format of being within a video game, but why not just make it a reboot if abandoning the confines of the original completely–reboots have been more egregious than that.
• We just had The Jungle Book, so these jungle critters better look amazing.

Are you more or less excited for this Jumanji sequel after seeing the trailer? What do you think of the plot format? Can these three funny men out-funny the original one?