Double-Trouble #4: Downsizing VS Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
Double Trouble #4
Downsizing VS Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
Welcome Ladies and Gentleman to the fourth Double Trouble Segment on You Can't Unwatch It. This is the segment where I see more than one movie and then do shorter reviews on them to save time…seem lazy to you? Maybe.
Today’s films are Downsizing and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. Almost seems unfair to compare the two movies but oh well. It is the Christmas season after all. I have lots to do with family. Let’s get right to it.
Downsizing (2017)
Matt Damon stars as Paul Safranek, a man who is not in the best of situations in life financially and I suppose socially who decides to go through a revolutionary new process called Downsizing that would shrink him and many others to not only try to save the planet by solving the overpopulation and environmental problems but also make their financial situation better. And that is about all I can do to summarize the movie as this one is an undercooked mess.
This is a movie that seems to want to be everything at once. There are times when it wants to be a social satire on overpopulation or even how people don’t contribute equally to the economy...that is never expounded upon after it is brought up. There comes a point in the story where Paul’s wife Audrey (Kirsten Wiig) suddenly decides not to shrink with her husband and divorces him leading him to try to find himself in a kind of human drama…. that is eventually dropped as well. It then tries to be a sort of human rights drama when he helps a Vietnamese woman Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau who is very good in this film and I do wish to see more of her in other work,) who has an artificial leg, cleans apartments and delivers medicine and food to people in slums…that one too is more or less dropped. And then there is the end where we have a kind of apocalyptic tale where Paul goes to Norway with Tran, his upstairs neighbor Dusan (the ever awesome Christoph Waltz) and his friend Konrad (Udo Kier who has been in…well…just about everything) to visit an original small people village.
This was a frustrating sit. This is a movie that doesn’t give you much to talk about because it did not know what it wants to be. Because it wants to go everywhere it ends up going nowhere. On top of that, I don’t know if any of the characters learn anything about themselves or the world by the end, especially Paul who is seriously the blandest of all the characters we follow. Seriously, the supporting cast is far more interesting…in fact I would love to see a movie just about Christoph Waltz and Udo Kier as two wild and crazy guys as I have heard them called by other reviewers on smuggling adventures. Damon’s character doesn’t seem to have any real character arc and just seems to do stuff because the script says so.
The downsizing concept feels wasted as it feels pushed to the side in favor of all the half-baked story ideas it keeps pushing out then quickly discarding. A funny film can be made here with the idea of people purposefully shrinking themselves to save the planet and such but in this one it seems to become an afterthought midway through the film. The performances are uniformly good (well Damon was just OK as the supporting cast upstaged him all the time) and the visuals are great to behold on occasion but they are all in service to an overall piece of nothing.
This is the first film from Alexander Payne (who gave us Sideways (2004) which was very good but I thought The Descendants (2011) and especially Nebraska (2013) were much better, even great) that I thought was quite bad. I thought to myself afterward “Why would a good filmmaker like Payne assemble a good cast and waste an interesting premise on an aimless, pointless and ultimately stale movie?” Why indeed. Oh well. Payne is talented enough to recover from this one and I look forward to what he has in store in the future.
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)
This was the second film my sister and I saw that day and thankfully this one was quite fun. How much fun? I can safely say that I wouldn’t mind seeing it again. You have four high school kids Spencer (Alex Wolff), Fridge (Ser’Darius Blain), Bethany (Madison Iseman) and Martha (Morgan Turner) all get detention for various reasons and have to work in a basement to serve their punishment. They all find a kind of game console that plays Jumanji which they get sucked in only to find each of them turn into Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black and Karen Gillan respectively. They have only three lives each and have to embark on a quest to return a green jewel to a huge panther statue and call out “Jumanji” in order to win and get out of the game.
I’ll be honest. I thought this one looked like crap when I saw the first trailer so it was refreshing that this one turned out as fun as it did. I actually enjoyed it more than the 1995 original film. The movie looks great, it’s fast paced and maintains the manic energy throughout the entire runtime even when it feels merely like Tron (1982) set in a jungle at times. The chemistry between the four characters are actually pretty good especially when they are in their game avatars. Each of the four are funny in their own way but the stand out is Jack Black when he has to play a high school girl in the body of a fat middle age man and the awkwardness that can come about. Seeing them adjust to what the strengths and weaknesses of their respective game characters are fun to watch and even lead to some hilarious moments ranging from their characters dying from their silly weaknesses or just bad luck like Kevin Hart exploding when eating cake or having Jack Black being eaten by a hippo right when the game starts.
I even enjoyed the jokes about how today’s games function when the characters encounter stuff like cut scenes turning up when they are talking or having an NPC (Non Playable Characters, for those not in the know) only respond to the right phrases or responses from the right person. There are other entertaining moments like having Martha do dance fighting, a sequence where our heroes use a helicopter to outrun stampeding rhinos and even the climax when they all have to work together to outrun the game villain (Bobby Cannavale) and return the jewel.
Look, this isn’t the deepest or most complex movie you will watch in cinemas right now. You won’t get any profound musings on the human condition or deep existential discussions between well-developed three dimensional characters. No, this movie exists just to entertain and to even teach the importance of working together and I suppose it does get the job done.
Between the two movies I have covered today the winner is Jumanji because at least it has a clear direction as to where it is going and what it is and it’s not boring. I would definitely watch this again over Star Wars Episode VIII but then again I’d watch Coco again over any of those but that’s a different conversation entirely.
