Jumanji arrived in December 1995 with a board game at its center and a simple promise: every roll brings something out of the jungle and into the living room. Joe Johnston directed from a screenplay by Jonathan Hensleigh, Greg Taylor and Jim Strain, working from Chris Van Allsburg’s 1981 picture book. TriStar Pictures released it through Sony Pictures Releasing, with Interscope Communications and Golden Mean Productions producing. The film runs 104 minutes and carries a tagline that tells you exactly what it thinks it is: “It’s a jungle in here.”
Trailer, via Sony Pics at Home.
A Boy Swallowed in 1969
The story starts in Brantford, New Hampshire, in 1969. Alan Parrish is a middle schooler with a father, Sam, who owns a shoe factory and an argument waiting to happen. Alan damages a shoe prototype made by Carl Bentley, a factory employee, and Carl takes the blame and loses his job. Alan finds the Jumanji board at a construction site, buried a century earlier, and brings it home. He and his friend Sarah Whittle start a game. Alan rolls, a message tells him to wait in a jungle until someone rolls a five or an eight, and he is pulled inside.
Twenty-six years pass. Judy and Peter Shepherd move into the empty Parrish mansion with their aunt Nora after their parents die in a ski trip accident in Canada. They find the game in the attic and play. Giant mosquitoes and a troop of monkeys arrive. Peter rolls a five, which releases a lion and an adult Alan, played by Robin Williams, back into the house.
Robin Williams and the Rules
The mechanic is the film’s best idea and its heaviest burden. Every turn produces a hazard, and the rules say everything resets when the game ends. That gives Jumanji a clock, a reason to keep rolling and a way to undo whatever it breaks. It also means the movie has to keep topping itself, and the creatures — rhinoceroses, monkeys, a lion, a hunter named Van Pelt — arrive as set pieces rather than as a story building toward anything.
Williams plays Alan as a man who lost 26 years and has no way to get them back. It is a strange role for him, quieter than his usual register, and the film does not always know what to do with the melancholy he brings. Jonathan Hyde doubles as Van Pelt, the big-game hunter who pursues Alan, and as Sam Parrish, Alan’s father. Bonnie Hunt plays the grown Sarah, now a fortune-teller marked by Alan’s disappearance. Kirsten Dunst and Bradley Pierce handle Judy and Peter, and David Alan Grier’s Carl returns as a police officer. Bebe Neuwirth plays Nora.
“It’s a jungle in here.”
What the Board Game Cannot Fix
The premise is strong enough that the film’s sequels kept returning to it. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle followed in 2017 and Jumanji: The Next Level in 2019, with Jumanji: Open World set for 2026. An animated series ran from 1996 to 1999, and Zathura: A Space Adventure spun off in 2005. The 1995 film made $263 million worldwide on a budget of about $65 million and finished as the tenth highest-grossing film of the year.
It also got mixed reviews, and that split holds up. The effects have aged unevenly, the pacing sags between rolls, and the emotional thread about Alan’s father never lands as hard as it should. What survives is the setup and Williams. A board game that punishes every move is a clean, mean engine, and the film understands that better than it understands its own characters. Judy and Peter are given a dead-parents backstory that the script mostly uses as a reason for them to be in the house.
The Verdict on Jumanji
Jumanji is a family adventure that works as a premise and coasts as a movie. It is not a disaster, and it is not a classic either. The best scenes are the ones where the game does something and the cast has to react, which is a compliment to the concept and a slight to the script. Williams holds the center, and Hunt matches him in the back half, but the film keeps trading character for creature.
The sequels would eventually solve the problem by making the game itself the joke. The 1995 original plays it straighter, and that seriousness is both its dignity and its limit. It is worth watching once for the idea and for Williams, and it is not worth arguing about beyond that.
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