What Year is it! And why is there a Sequel!?
The game is back and it has a shiny new paint job. When four kids in detention discover a mysterious video game, they get sucked into a new world as the characters they chose. The only way home is to beat the game. But beware, if you die in the game, you die in the real world, maybe?
Why oh why must we reboot old movies/franchises?! Maybe we should have just let the franchise stay at one entry. This movie didn’t work for me on several levels. The comedy, writing, character development, and “drama” are all poorly handled throughout the movie.
The comedy did not work most, if not all of the time. Something about the timing just didn’t garner laughs from my audience where there was obviously supposed to be some. I usually steer clear of trailers of movies that I’m excited to watch, so I went ahead and watched this. All of the “good” jokes were used in it and the weird thing is, they were edited differently in the movie and just didn’t land the same as in the trailer. There were some gags that worked, but it mostly didn’t land.
I don’t know why I keep going to Kevin Hart buddy cop movies. After Ride Along 2 and Central Intelligence, I should have been done, but I can probably blame trusting the Tomatometer. The critic side usually steers me right, but the same tropes of those movies are here. Short jokes, being inferior to the bigger guy, race jokes, and all while screaming frantically. I guess it’s just not my type of humor, but it didn’t seem like it engaged my fellow movie-goers either.
The character writing is pretty bad for a modern movie. It feels like this was written for the 90’s because it doesn’t feel progressive in some ways especially for what I assume is a kids movie. Although we can say that the game within the movie is from that time period, there are some tiresome tropes in here. Big buff guy, short guy for comparison, fat guy, and overly sexualized female. They do body swap kids of the opposite archetype, but it just feels that they don’t learn much from this, only that they appreciate each other and are now friends.
***Warning: Spoilers***
The ending was a bit messy. When leaving the world, we were lead to consider the main character possibly making a tough decision to stay in the game as his buff avatar. It easily gets brushed off by his new found crush. This little subplot could have been taken out entirely, or could have gone through if they decide to make another movie.
Of course there is the plot of the other kid being stuck in the game for years. When he returns to his time and diverts the timeline of his family, he runs into the kids. I guess the popular girl character developed a thing for his character and they have a life saving subplot. Because of this, it turns out that he named his daughter after her. But this moment is undercut with humor because of his 90’s surfer talk that never went away, and the fact that it was Jack Black giving cpr to Nick Jonas for comedic effect.
I may have missed it, but how do they know that they would die in real life? As far as I know, there was not explicit explanation to what happens if they run out of lives. Opposed to the first movie, everything was happening in the real world. This one takes place within the game and as avatars. It isn’t touched on like other “sucked into video game” movie, so it may be a possibility that you just go back into the real world. The omission of this point is a bit bothersome.
This is a sequel that probably should not have been made. A lot of it just did not work. It did have some funny moments, even if most of them were already spoiled in the trailers. Maybe you’ll be better off skipping this one, unless you want to distract kids that you’re related to for a while.