Jumanji

San Francisco Examiner Walter Addiego

The result is a thrill ride with enough plunges and turns and loop-the-loops to make it worth a spin. What the picture lacks is the magic and resonance you feel in the best of popular entertainments.

TV Guide Staff(not credited)

Regrettably, however, the weird elegance of Chris Van Allsburg's much-praised picture book has been all but lost in translation.

USA Today Mike Clark

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]

The New York Times Elvis Mitchell

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.

Empire Staff(not credited)

On a scene by scene basis, it is mostly great fun but suffers from a contrived script which repetitively drags characters back to the eponymous magical board game for another effect-producing throw of the dice.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

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

Variety Leonard Klady

The screenplay, however, denies the film a solid foundation. Jumanji is diverting in a splashy , eye-catching manner, but is about as substantive and durable as filigree.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

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.

San Francisco Chronicle Peter Stack

As a movie, it's far from compelling. As a thrill ride, though, it's a rampaging special effects and animatronics extravaganza that will make small children cringe behind their seats.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

The terror sequences (not only animals but monsoons and earthquakes and quicksand) are scary until they get monotonous: after a while, you have a sense you're watching a clip reel from every Hollywood disaster flick ever made.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

The movie takes time to warm up, it weakens into soppiness at the end, and the game itself, if you think it through, makes very little sense.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

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.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

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

Washington Post Rita Kempley

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.

Los Angeles Times Jack Mathews

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

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Mostly trite and tacky despite Robin Williams's strenuous acting.

Newsweek John Leland

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

Time Richard Corliss

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.