Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle was a surprisingly funny hit two years ago. It’s one of those movies that clearly wasn’t written to be a franchise, but its box office take—$400 million, according to Box Office Mojo—ensured we’d be returning to that jungle more than once. As we all know, though, making sequels is hard. But thanks to the return of the original cast and director Jake Kasdan, The Next Level manages to pull it off. Here are seven things that make it worth seeing:

1. It’s a direct sequel to the original. The first question likely to get asked is, “do I need to have seen the original before I see this one?,” and the answer is an unqualified “Yes.” The sequel starts a couple of years after the original. Spencer, Eddie, Bethany and Martha have all gone off to separate colleges, but reunite for the holidays. Spencer returns home to find that his grandfather (Danny DeVito) is staying in his room while he recovers from hip surgery. Feeling insecure, Spencer decides to return to Jumanji in the hopes that spending some more time as Bravestone will help give him some confidence. His friends discover what he has done and decide to go in after him, but things go wrong as the malfunctioning game sucks in not only them, but also Spencer’s grandfather and his aging friend, played by Danny Glover.

2. It does a great job refreshing the franchise without needing to retcon the original. The basic story is the same as the first movie: a bad guy in Jumanji has stolen a magical stone that will bring ruin to the land, and the heroes need to find it and return it to its rightful owner. But, just like in countless video game sequels that take the same story and give it a bit of a twist, The Next Level (get it?) takes the adventure out of the jungle and makes them work their way through a desert and snowy mountainscape.

But where The Next Level really shakes things up is by flipping around the characters. (Slight spoiler ahead, but nothing that isn’t in the trailers and isn’t revealed in the first act.) Spencer didn’t succeed in becoming Bravestone again—instead, it’s DeVito’s character that takes on the role. Glover gets dropped into Moose Finbar (Kevin Hart), while Eddie becomes Dr. Shelley Oberon (Jack Black). (To the credit of the people behind the movie, the trailers never even hint at what character Spencer gets transported into, and I’m not going to spoil it here, either.)

Many of the movie’s funniest parts are Dwayne Johnson playing the somewhat senile grandfather, all along doing a pretty decent Jersey accent. And the banter between him and Hart is just great.

But one of the most refreshing parts of the movie is that not everyone jumps into a new body. Martha once again becomes Ruby Roundhouse, and with the others struggling to figure out their new identities, Next Level allows Karen Gillan to really take the lead.

3. Like a good video game sequel, it gives the characters new powers. Remember how cool it was to get to dual wield weapons in Halo 2? With their return to Jumanji, the characters discover that they have new abilities as well, and the writers did a good job of making these matter to the story.

4. It’s funny and has a heart. Like the original, The Next Level has plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, but also like the original, it has real heart. It’s a story about a group of people who genuinely care for another thrown into a stressful situation, but rather than turn on one another they bind together and not only work to make sure they complete their goal of saving Jumanji, they make sure they do it in a way that everyone makes it out OK.

5. It’s family friendly. The movie is rated PG-13 for “adventure action, suggestive content and some language”. The adventure action part should be obvious. The language part is mostly because some of the characters like to say “shit”, but I don’t recall many other bad words. And the final part? “Suggestive content” is MPAA code for sex, and I honestly I had to stop and think about that a bit to remember what they might be referring to, which I think shows that the scene in question is so minor that you won’t mind watching the movie with your younger teens or your grandmother.

6. It’s well paced. The movie is a bit over 2 hours long, but doesn’t feel like it. It starts out a bit slow, since they do need to tell us what’s been happening to these characters in the two years since we last saw them and introduce DeVito and Glover’s characters, but it isn’t very long before everyone is back inside the video game and things really get moving. Which, by the way, might beg the question as to when a good time to sneak out to the restroom is, and the answer to that: at the end of the movie. There really isn’t a wasted moment once things get going.

7. You don’t need to stay through the credits. Very shortly after the credits begin, there’s a new scene that is worth staying for, so don’t run out of the theater right away. But once that scene is over there’s nothing meaningful for the remainder of the time. There’s a very brief audio bit at the very end, but it’s not worth sticking around for, especially if you really need to make that bathroom run.

Jumanji: The Next Level opens this weekend in theaters nationwide.