MAGIC RUN RIOT

"Jumanji" (PG) Savoy, Virgin, UCIs, Omniplex, Dublin.

There seems to be nothing Robin Williams likes more than playing Peter Pan, and he gets to do it yet again in this special effects extravaganza which attempts to use new technology to rework some of the classic movie fantasies. Unfortunately the effects from the dinosaur creators at George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic swamp the store and the resulting film is disappointingly confused.

In 1969, a 12 year old boy comes across a mysterious old board game in a small American town. When he rolls the dice, he disappears for 26 years, until two more children (Kirsten Dunst and Bradley Pierce) find the game and release him back (now as Robin Williams) into the real world. To return to normality, they must finish the game and run the gauntlet of the jungle monsters which emerge from the board.

Director Joe Johnston, himself a product of the Industrial Light and Magic stable, has a track record in effects driven films such as Honey, I Shrunk The Kids and The Rocketeer. Here, the impression is that ambition has outrun the current limits of the technology available. Jumanji is presented by its makers as the next logical step from the computer generated wizardry of Jurassic Park, with monkeys, lions and rhinos taking the place of dinosaurs. But the fantasy world of the film doesn't have the inner coherence of, say, The Wizard Of Oz. It veers between cartoonish animation and fairly standard animatronics.

In the midst of all this, the story gets lost. There's a Capraesque plotline about what has happened to the town because of Williams's disappearance, but there's no time to develop this properly. Non sequiturs abound, particularly towards the end, suggesting that there may have been ruthless pruning in the editing room.

That said, Jumanji isn't a total failure: some of the set pieces are undeniably spectacular but it could have benefited from more attention to character development and fewer magic tricks.

. To mark the 10th anniversary of its original release, Bruce Robinson's cultish British comedy, Withnail & I is reissued (in a new print) at the IFC from today. It features vivid performances from Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann as aspiring actors who take off from their squalid London home for a disastrous trip to the country.