The beloved Robin Williams movie that Roger Ebert detested: “Gratuitous cruelty”
When you think of any given Robin Williams movie, chances are, “gratuitous cruelty” isn’t the phrase that comes to mind. Gratuitous ad-libbing, maybe, or gratuitous sentimentality in the case of films like Patch Adams and Dead Poets Society, but cruelty is a tricky one to argue. If anyone could make a case for it, however, it was Roger Ebert.
Between the late 60s and his death in 2013, the film critic took bold stances on cinema that often turned out to be the future consensus. He was an early champion of filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, for example, and helped bring widespread attention to once-niche directors like Werner Herzog and Spike Lee.
When he took a film to task, he was usually right, such as when he panned Mike Myers’s The Love Guru, saying it could have been “written on toilet walls by callow adolescents,” or said that the Jack Black vehicle Saving Silverman was “an example of the lowest slopes of the bell-shaped curve.”
In theory, there were a lot of Robin Williams movies that Ebert might have despised. Although the stand-up comic-turned Oscar winner starred in some of the most beloved movies of the ‘90s, including Good Will Hunting, Mrs Doubtfire, and The Birdcage, he also appeared in his fair share of poorly scripted and even juvenile comedies. Flubber might be a childhood favourite, but it really doesn’t stand the test of time, and why, oh why did anyone agree to make RV: Runaway Vacation?
Strangely enough, however, neither of these miscalculations outraged Ebert nearly as much as the unassailable 1995 childhood classic, Jumanji. If you watched this film as a kid and loved it, I have good news for you: it holds up.
Directed by Joe Johnston, it stars a very young Kirsten Dunst and Bradley Pearce as siblings who discover an old board game called Jumanji in their aunt’s attic. It turns out to summon monstrous creatures into the real world, and they are forced to rely on Williams’s character, a man who got trapped in the game as a child and helps the siblings end it once and for all. With elaborate practical effects and CGI, it is a delightful action fantasy film that is just the right amount of scary for children and engrossing for adults.
The movie was a box office smash, raking in $262million off of a $65million budget, but critics had mixed reactions. No one was quite so disgusted as Ebert, though. Giving the film one-and-a-half out of four stars, he condemned it for being far too scary for its target audience, saying that it was about as appropriate for small children as Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.
Pointing to a sequence in which the young brother is partly transformed into a monkey, he wrote, “To me, it looked like gratuitous cruelty on the part of the filmmakers toward the harmless young character,” and compared it to a violent video game.
In 1995, Ebert was proving himself to be pretty forward-thinking yet again by invoking concerns about how video game violence might impact young children. However, his concerns about Jumanji were off base. Perhaps if it had been given a PG-13 or 12A certificate instead of a PG, he might have appreciated its inventiveness a little more.
