Movie: Zathura

Zathura (Widescreen Edition)Last night while Denis took CootieGirl to a local triple-AAA baseball game for Fireworks Night I stayed home with CootieBoy and watched “Zathura”. The movie is kind of a “Jumanji” remake set in space instead of the jungle. Two kids find an old game in the basement of their father’s house and begin to play – on the first turn the card reads “Meteor Shower – Take Evasive Action” and suddenly the room in which they sit is inundated with tiny meteors coming through the ceiling. And so goes the game of “Zathura”.

I loved “Jumanji”. It is probably one of my favorite kid’s movie of all time. Whenever it’s on TV I find myself watching it whether there is an hour left or ten minutes. Do I love “Zathura” as much? Definitely not. I worried how Dax Shepherd would be as an actor (he of Ashton Kutcher’s “Punk’d” on MTV) and I have to say he wasn’t bad. Not great, but workable. The kids in the movie were hilarious (especially the younger one).

I wondered if CootieBoy would be able to sit and watch a non-cartoon movie that takes a good 20-minutes to really get going. And I was impressed that the movie kept him interested for the first 15 minutes before he fell asleep (not because the movie was boring but because he skipped his nap yesterday). After ten minutes of shut-eye he was up again and enjoyed the rest of the movie.

And I did too.

3 gold cards out of five.