Welcome to the Jungle

Kipling isn't rolling in his grave ... yet

One could easily make the argument that Jon Favreau’s (Iron Man) new live-action Jungle Book adaptation is another nail in the “Hollywood is out of fresh ideas” coffin, but there are enough new elements mixed in with nods to the animated Disney “classic” that it’s worth checking out, even if you aren’t being forced by your kids. We follow young Mowgli (newcomer Neel Sethi), a man-cub who was found in the jungle by the wise and just panther, Bagheera (Ben Kingsley), and deposited with a pack of wolves to be raised all wolf-like and to learn the ways of the jungle. Bagheera super-duper loves this kid and spends all sorts of time with him and his wolf-bros, running informal training drills so as to make the jungle a little safer. 

Life is good for Mowgli, but then a dry spell causes a lack of drinking water and thus the need for a jungle-wide truce; since there’s pretty much only one place where an animal can get a sip, they all ditch the predator/prey dynamic and get drinking. This is actually a real-life thing that happens for wild animals, so that’s cool, but it brings the totally angry Shere Khan (voiced to epically evil proportions by Idris Elba) to town, and he’s not havin’ it. Turns out homeboy got burnt real bad by a man some time ago, and he tells everyone that unless they hand Mowgli over once the rain returns, he’ll kill them all. Yikes. So Bagheera tells Mowgli he needs to go back to live with his own kind, and then all kinds of adventures go down. 

Still with me? Good. So like I said, Mowgli adventures like crazy and gets wrapped up in all kinds of wacky situations with cute animals and scary animals and cutesy animals and so on. The voice acting is generally top-notch, with performances from Bill Murray, who brings his very best Bill Murray impression to the table as Baloo the Bear, a mildly enjoyable updated version of Louis Prima’s “Wanna Be Like You” musical number courtesy of Christopher Walken as King Louie, and any number of bit parts here and there. Scarlett Johansson sure stinks it up as the anaconda Kaa, who exists only to provide exposition in the form of a snake-like hypnotizing, but her appearance is thankfully so brief that it doesn’t much matter, and we’re soon back to more enjoyable events like a death-defying cliffside quest for honey or Shere Khan spooking everyone out miserably. 

By the end of The Jungle Book, it’s unclear if there was supposed to be some kind of message about environmentalism and how fire is powerful or something about nature versus nurture, but since the CGI is some of the best to date and there’s not a lot cooler than a bear fighting a tiger, it ultimately doesn’t matter. If you liked the animated version as a kid, are one of the few who has actually read the book (don’t lie, we know most of you didn’t) or want to take your kids someplace (shout out to the parents behind me in the theater, who totally let their young kid walk around through the whole thing and kick the back of my seat for a good five minutes), you could do a lot worse than this. Just don’t expect much more than a capably told story with lots of flashy computer animation.

The Jungle Book
Directed by Jon Favreau
With Sethi, Murray, Kingsley
Violet Crown, Regal 14
PG, 105 min.

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