It's a Dwayne Johnson-Danny DeVito mashup nobody ever thought to ask for.
If you were trying to come up with two polar opposite actors, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a better pair than Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Danny DeVito. The former is a tall, muscular action star with a silky baritone; the latter, a short, plump character actor with distinctly Jersey rasp.
The odd couple is joining forces in Jumanji: The Next Level, and the first trailer has us looking forward to the Freaky Friday-, 13 Going on 30-style laughs the film seeks out of the juxtaposition. It feels like the kind of thing that can’t not be entertaining, which is exactly what you want from an action-comedy-fantasy blockbuster.
The trailer begins with Spencer, one of the teenagers from the last film, fiddling with the enchanted game during a late night in his basement and inadvertantly getting himself sucked back in. When his friends come to visit and find him missing, they deduce what happened and decide to rescue him.
The trailer reunites Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Karen Gillan, along with Johnson, as playable avatars within the enchanted video game. But instead of Spencer, who took on Johnson’s Smolder Bravestone as his avatar in the last film, it’s DeVito’s character, Spencer’s grandfather, who plays as The Rock.
“Are we in Florida?” is the first thing we hear The Rock as DeVito say, sounding just like a West Palm retiree from the Garden State. It’s a good sign of the absurdity to come, and the way Johnson-as-DeVito says the word “thighs” alone makes the trailer worth watching.
The rest of the trailer shows stampeding ostriches, baboons running across rope bridges, Nick Jonas, and Awkwafina. And while not quite as ridiculous as seeing Luke Hobbs play Frank Reynolds, Kevin Hart’s avatar embodied by Danny Glover is another opposites attract mash-up we’re looking forward to seeing when Jumanji: The Next Level is released on December 13.
