Many fans have been anticipating Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart’s newest film, Jumanji: The Next Level. This movie brings back the previous four friends from Jumanji: Welcome to The Jungle. We see that Spencer (Alex Wolff) is attending school in New York while being in a long-distance relationship with Martha (Morgan Turner). Both characters are having a little problem in their relationship, and as Spencer  is returning home from the holidays, he is unsure of whether they are together or not. We see that Spencer’s grandfather Eddie (Danny DeVito), is staying with them since he had hip surgery and that he and Eddie will be sharing a room with each other. Later that  night, Spencer is still up and he heads into the basement to retrieve the broken Jumanji game. He ends up fixing it and heads back into the game. His friends, Martha, Bethany (Madison Iseman), and Fridge (Ser’Darius Blain) are all waiting for him as he had planned on hanging out with them, but never showed up. Later, they headed to Spencer’s house and were  greeted by Eddie’s long time friend Milo (Danny Glover) who greets the three as they come and search for Spencer. However, they start to hear the banging of the drums, just as they heard when they first got sucked into Jumanji, and they soon figure out that Spencer is trapped in the game with no help. 

     As many already know, the characters are now in the video game, but with a twist: instead of being the original group from the first movie (Spencer, Martha, Fridge, and Bethany) Eddie, Milo, Martha, and Fridge are the ones who were chosen to save Jumanji. The movie has many jokes that are repeated throughout the story, which makes it funny at first, but then eventually becomes stale. For example, Eddie is constantly told that he is in a video game, and never listens to the other players when they say not to do something. Personally, I liked that joke at first, but it just flopped after the third time. Another thing that kinda fell flat was Fridges’ character. In this movie he just seems more annoying than before. In the first movie, we got introduced to the characters, so it wasn’t as important. But in the second movie I just felt like he talked too much about not liking the characters they were, due to the fact that they couldn’t pick their own characters like in the first one. Fridges’ character was Professor Sheldon “Shelly” Oberon (Jack Black), and the character is over-weight with many weaknesses like endurance, heat, and sand which are honestly some dumb weaknesses. Fridge talks about how much he hates the body of his character, just like he did in the first movie, which is maybe the reason why it just didn’t hit perfectly. 

     In general, Jumanji was a good movie. The action scenes were very entertaining to watch and I do give them credit for that, because it has improved since the first movie. What I liked about Jumanji: The Next Level was how we got two new characters, and got to see a good touching story about old friends rekindling their friendship as they got closer and closer to ending the game. To be really honest, the ending kind of surprised me. Milos’ character decides to stay in the game because he knows that he doesn’t have much time left to live anyways. It would be better for him to just stay in the game where he can roam free and not have to worry about taking his last breath.