The Jungle Book (2016) Movie Review

The Jungle Book is the latest in Disney’s line-up of live-action reboots of their animated classics directed by Jon Favreau.

In this version, we meet Mowgli, a young man cub who’s part of a wolf pack accompanied by a panther named Bagheera. They join the rest of the jungle in a temporary truce at a spring lake where he gets discovered by a tiger named Shere Khan, who vows to hunt him down once the truce is over with. For this reason, Bagheera leads Mowgli towards the man village when, along the way, he bumps into creatures known as Kaa the snake, King Louie the Primate, and, of course, Baloo the bear, all the characters we recognize from the original.

Now, I wasn’t sure what to expect going into this; I wasn’t a huge fan of the original film, Disney’s live-action reboots, thus far, have been literally a hit and a miss, and the trailers didn’t really say that much about the film itself. However, I was overall incredibly impressed by this film. Unlike Alice in Wonderland where they tried to tell what was essentially a mindless trip of nonsense as a war story, The Jungle Book converts its story that was originally used for jazzy musical numbers in its predecessor into a dark and dramatic action story with phenomenal character development and a few twists up its sleeve.

A good chunk of what makes these characters so strong is in its performances. Ben Kingsley brings majestic characteristics to Bagheera, practically a match made in heaven. Idris Elba holds a very intimidating performance as Shere Khan. Seriously, name another actor that can roar his lines like him. Bill Murray is very fitting as the lazy, goofy, but also friendly and relatable Baloo, Scarlett Johansson is very sinister as Kaa, and Christopher Walken…. Well, he’s hilarious in anything he does. The only performance I didn’t like was Neel Sethi as Mowgli. His performance is very stiff and lifeless. Despite him shouting every line he has, there’s just not much energy to his delivery. But to cut him a break, he did have to go on green screen for basically this entire movie.

The entire jungle in this and all of its inhabitants is 100% CGI, but much like Avatar or the two recent Planet of the Apes movies, the texture and detail that went into it is so extensive that it’s still cool to look at, and the animation on the characters is much more fitting to their personalities than if the filmmakers had attempted to use real animals.

Overall, The Jungle Book is by no means perfect, but it’s much more impressive and far more engrossing than any other live-action reboot that Disney has sent out thus far. Definitely check it out.

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