Based on Chris Van Allsburg’s 1981 children’s book “Jumanji,” Jake Kasdan’s film reimagines the book’s magic-board-game idea for the era of video games, by transforming its teen heroes into adult avatars*.

The screenwriting team reimagines it as a 1990s-style gaming console*. In a prologue, a lone teenager comes across the game in 1996, turns it on and is immediately transported from his bedroom into a world we do not see.

Cut to the present day, as Spencer (Alex Wolff) squirts* some sanitizer* on his hands, packs his EpiPen and heads to his high school. After a quick sequence of events, he winds up in detention* alongside football player Fridge (Ser’Darius Blain), narcissistic* Bethany (Madison Iseman) and the introverted* Martha (Morgan Turner). They’re supposed to be cleaning up the school’s storage closet* as punishment for their misdeeds. But when they find this old video game, the four decide to try it out. They, too, get sucked into another dimension.

Thrown into a dense jungle, each kid is transformed into the character he or she selected when they fired the game up. Each chose someone very unlike himself: Skinny Spencer becomes Dwayne Johnson’s Smolder Bravestone, the expedition* leader. Fridge is now a zoologist*, Moose Finbar (Kevin Hart), and is none too pleased about it. Martha is kick-ass* Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan), and immediately complains about the clothes she thinks too sexy. And Instagram-addicted Bethany, so proud of her looks, has turned into a tubby*, balding middle-aged man, Jack Black’s Professor Shelly Oberon.

The script winks at video game conventions as it explains its heroes’ strengths and weaknesses, gives them a mission and reveals that each has three lives to expend before it’s “Game Over” for real. They’re supposed to find a magical “jewel of the jungle” and return it to a giant statue’s eye socket. But that stone is also hunted by a bad guy (Bobby Cannavale) who has somehow become one with the jungle’s beasts, making his body a home for millipedes* and scorpions that do his bidding.