“This is Alan’s home – I’m just liv🐲ing in it,” someone says in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, in reference to the character Robin Williams played in the 1995 original. It’s a poignant tip of the hat to the late actor, whose tragic absence is an elephant in the room every bit as apparent as the computer-generated pachyderm that shows up on screen. What it also does, alas, is highlight one of this sequel-slash-reboot’s key deficiencies: the lack of any significant connective tissue with its forerunner.

Gone is director Joe Johnston, whose seat behind the camera is now filled by 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Bad Teacher’s Jake Kasdan. Absent too are the first film’s writer꧑s, sup🌠porting actors and creative personnel (most notably composer James Horner, who died in 2015). Even Jumanji’s different this time around: the arcane board game of Johnston’s movie has now morphed into an Atari-style videogame.

The result is more like 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Kong: Skull Island than Jumanji, with Kasdan jettisoning one of the latter’s most subversive pleasures: the anarchic juxta๊pos🐼ition of a small American town with rampant feral beasties, mischievously cast onto the unsuspecting streets by a game with a mind of its own.

🐓The game still thinks for itself in WTTJ, but within much more restrictive parameters. Here the set-up is that each player has his or her own personal avatar, a body-switch gimmick that enables a geek to resemble The Rock, a wallflower to look like Karen Gillan and a cellphone-obsessed girl to become Jack Black. (Kevin Hart completes the quartet as a whiny weakling.)

The disconnect between player and proxy is relentlessly milked, as in the scene where Black ✅performs mouth-to-mouth on a young man he/she has a crush on. Yet it’s a joke that only goes so far, dependent as it is on its stars’ established screen personas and a depressingly retrograde view of gender roles. (At one point Black gives Gillan tips on how to ape a sexpot seductress.)

With only 12 lives between them, the mission at hand is to return a glowing green jewel to its rightful place without being eaten by hippos, stung by mosquitoes or gunned down by Bobby Cannavale’s villain and his moto💃rcycling goons.

Along the way, they hook up with an earlier captive of the game (Nick Jonas in a r﷽ole intended for Tom Holland) whose pilot skills come in handy during the film’s best set-piece: a hair-raising chopper chase through a canyon with a horde of stampeding rhinos in hot pursuit.

Complete every level and they have a chance of getting back to the real world, and their real bodies. If they don’t, they are destined to stay in Jumanji forever – which, c𒆙onsidering it’s really Oahu, doesn’t seem much ♛of a hardship.

Those craving CGI critters, Gillan in a crop top and more of the Dwayne Johnson-Kevin Hart bromance they saw in 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Central Intelligence won’t be disappointed. Yet even they’d agree this is little more than a sporadically diverting but ultimately soulless exercise in brand exploitation. At one point in the story, each of its protagonists discovers they have a pop-up screen inside them revealing their various strengths and weaknesses. Were this cap🥃er to have one of its own, it wouldn’t make for happy reading.