The Jungle Book of 1967 is one of my favourite Disney animated features. I awaited the live action remake with cautious optimism, and it was with great difficulty that I judged it independent of my feelings about the original.
The live-action remake follows the orphaned “man-cub” Mowgli who is raised by a pack of wolves in the jungles of India. All is well until Shere Khan the tiger announces his intention to kill Mowgli, sending the man-cub on an adventure to seek safety.
It’s a good looking film. But it doesn’t look great. I wanted The Jungle Book to be, at the very least, pure escapism. I loved the intro, where the jungle really feels like it has been brought to life. Then I got my first look at Bagheera and I felt one of my eyebrows rise.
There are a lot of brilliant aspects of the animal animation. The lifelike fur has a pleasing sway in the breeze and a sticky slump in the rain. How they walk, lie, bite, and growl is often like watching the discovery channel. But it isn’t perfect. If you’re familiar with the “uncanny valley” you know what I’m saying – close to being completely realistic but just misses the mark, so it inhabits a horrid, uncomfortable region.
Seven years ago the environments of Avatar blew my mind. Two years ago, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes delivered more seamless depictions of animals who spoke and were just as emotive as real people. Even last year, The Good Dinosaur contained some jaw-dropping animated environments. So no – The Jungle Book is not as boundary-pushing as many claim it to be.
In my Zootropolis review I was hesitant to praise the voice actors because really, how hard is it? Christopher Walken was great as King Louie, and I enjoyed Idris Elba’s portrayal of Shere Khan. However, Ben Kingsley proves that it’s possible to give a disaster of a voice performance, as his Bagheera speaks with zero emotion, and never in reaction to anything that’s going on at the time. He delivers every line like he’s reading them off a page with no cues or context. Maybe this Bagheera is just supposed to have the personality of a roof tile but his actions suggest otherwise, which is why I’m inclined to criticise the performance. Even more disappointing was Bill Murray as Baloo. I thought he was the perfect choice but again, he was oddly flat and unmemorable.
At least they were never as bad as Neel Sethi as Mowgli. I’m talking Jake Lloyd as Anakin Skywalker levels of terrible. Whenever the performance demanded any emotional heft, the line delivery became appalling, and worse still were his distracting reactions that stripped away any sense of wonder and immersion. I know for the most part he was just in a CGI room, so maybe there’s more to blame here.
This brings me to the direction. I think Jon Favreau was the wrong pick for this film. He tries too hard to convince us that this is a real world remake. As a result, a lot of the visuals wind up looking drab with none of the magic or sense of adventure that the original basked in. It all comes down to tone. It tries to be so bleak and gritty that none of the humour lands. We switch between the heartfelt drama and bumbling light-hearted comedy so quickly that we aren’t sure how to respond to a lot of the scenes.
Most baffling of all was the inclusion of some of the songs. There aren’t any during the first act of the film. And of course not – this is a version that tries to humanise its animal characters and set a darker tone. When Baloo suddenly breaks out into song and it’s forgivable because it’s done in a fairly organic way. But when the film goes to great lengths to establish King Louie as an intimidating secondary villain, only to have him randomly start singing during his monologue, it’s more than a little jarring.
The songs are only there because the audience likes them, and this brings me to my biggest issue with the film: It isn’t ballsy enough to completely depart from the original story. Bear in mind that the plot of the original is probably its weakest attribute. It’s an episodic string of scenes tied together by the simple idea: Boy needs safety with his own kind due to deadly tiger. But this remake sticks so closely to it that it doesn’t give itself enough room to breathe.
Because of this, we get some really forced moments and botched characterisation. Kaa is reduced to an exposition vehicle with five minutes of screentime. Shere Khan is established as a hunter, yet his method of killing Mowgli is basically to sit around and wait. He can also smell Mowgli at a distance while he’s in a herd of animals, but in a crucial scene later seemingly misses the scent entirely. Bagheera encourages Baloo to reason with Mowgli at a time when Baloo is the only one Mowgli will listen to. Then Baloo instead just insults Mowgli with no reconciliation.
Most offensive of all is how Shere Khan’s motives are painfully spelled out to the audience. Everything that’s implied in the original is made excruciatingly clear, and a certain change diminishes the scariness of his character. Shere Khan is so frightening in the original because his relationship to Mowgli is so impersonal. Minor spoiler: The remake tries to make his vendetta more personal, and as a result he’s less fearsome.
This all comes down to the film’s insistence that it retread all the same beats as the original. We have to have a Kaa scene. We have to have that Baloo moment. But they don’t mesh with the alterations they made to the story. What little they altered is also done in the most cliche way imaginable – you might wonder whether you’d walked into a live action adaptation of The Lion King. This is with one exception: A solid effort was made to make Mowgli a better character, selling us on his need to find a new home and intensifying the theme of what it means to belong.
It’s the characterisation of the rest of the animals that I have serious gripes with. This is where I have to separate out my personal feelings. I can’t objectively criticise the new versions by saying “they’re bad because they’re not like the original characters”. But can I personally express that I hate the new versions for that very reason? You bet I can, and I’ll take a sarcastic, irritable Bagheera over a humorless one any day.
In the end, The Jungle Book should have been a thrilling adventure – a modern adaptation that built on the magic of the original while establishing itself in its own right. Instead, it’s a watered-down rehash, albeit with a few pleasing visual elements but with weak voice work and poor characterisation that shit all over everything I happened to love about the original.
(GRADES: Both are from 0 to 10. The left is an objective score based on artistic merit, the right is my personal enjoyment.)
READ MORE:
Click here for my best and worst films of 2015!
Find out more about me as a reviewer here: Get To Know Me As a Reviewer
Check out my weekly film reviews.
Follow me @MagoosReviews for updates!
Magoo's Reviews 