Cinderella gave me hope that, with a competent film crew with some good actors, these frustrating Disney reboots would not be torturous to sit through as we draw closer to the coming releases of Beauty and the Beast and other films. And while I do like the animated versions of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Alice in Wonderland all well, none of those films crack my personal Top 10 Disney Animated films. The Jungle Book does, however. With it's great songs, incredible charm and delightful characters, Walt Disney turned a deeply interesting and thought provoking story of Tarzan in India into a lighthearted comedy that was the most successful Disney film in their canon until The Little Mermaid in 1989. So naturally, I was skeptical at first when this film was slated to premiere. But, like Cinderella before it, the film seemed to be in good directorial hands (Jon Favreau of Iron Man and Elf fame), and had a cast of incredible actors at it's disposal (Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Ben Kingsley, Idris Elba, Christopher Walken, among others), and seemed to be taking a more literal interpretation of the book, which I was fascinated to see. And yet, the film was literally nothing like I expected it to be. With tone problems ranging throughout, fairly bizarre performances from otherwise great actors and the most CGI-looking CGI I'd seen since the freaking Star Wars prequels, this film was a mess from start to finish. Not quite as bad as Alice in Wonderland, but a big step backward from Cinderella.
Plot: A "man-cub" named Mowgli is raised amongst the wolves in the jungle after a panther named Bagheera brought him to them as an infant. But his life is thrust into danger by the man hating tiger named Shere Khan, who returns to the jungle and warns that once the "water truce" between the animals comes to an end, he would come after Mowgli and kill anyone that stood in his way. To protect the pack, Mowgli and Bagheera leave for a man village where he would be safe from Khan's wrath (as Khan sustained major injuries to Man and his "Red Flower"). After a brutal encounter with Khan, however, Mowgli and Bagheera are separated as Mowgli is forced to confront the hypnotic snake named Kaa himself, only to be rescued by a lazy sloth bear named Baloo.
Infuriated that Mowgli escaped his wrath, Khan kills the Wolf Pack's leader and threatens to take complete control of their lands until Mowgli is brought to him. Bagheera arrives to warn Baloo of this, prompting the bear to try and send Mowgli away. As Mowgli discovers more and more about Man and the power of the Red Flower, he begins to wonder whether or not he is capable of using it and if he could perhaps use it's power to keep his loved ones safe and stop the tyranny of Shere Khan once and for all.
What's Wrong?: As mentioned above, the film has quite a few flaws, my personal biggest flaw being the film's immense tone problems. The film cannot seem to decide whether it wants to be a serious retelling of the original Rudyard Kipling story or a comedic retelling of the 1967 Disney film. Both things are in themselves, mutually exclusive things. Bill Murray's comedic antics about stealing honey from bees does not gel well with the next scene of Khan throwing Akela off a cliff. It's not just scenes like this though. There is a pointless scene where Shere Khan seems to threaten a wolf cub in front of his mother, around the same time as when Bagheera calls out Baloo on his humorous lies to Mowgli about Sloth Bears hibernating.
The film's CGI is also abysmal. Like Dinosaur, the film was made with semi-real backgrounds and CGI characters to go with the one human character in Mowgli. However, the characters were made comedically larger than in real life in comparison to the actual sized Mowgli. Ergo, virtually all of the animals are freaking huge in comparison to Mowgli, whereas in real life, those animals aren't nearly as big. Not only that, but if the animal characters are supposed to evoke real life animals, they hardly do so. The only character that looked anything close to an actual version of his animal was Shere Khan. But the rest was skewed at best.
What's Right?: Well, the casting of this film is pretty solid. Idris Elba makes for a chilling Shere Khan and Ben Kingsley as Bagheera seemed almost ideal casting. Even the kid they got to play Mowgli captured the essence of both jungle boy and little boy that the character was supposed to evoke, though I will say that the rest of the cast was, at best, interesting. Bill Murray was a passable Baloo, but I always knew it was Bill Murray as Baloo instead of the character from the original. Scarlett Johansson's "sexualized" Kaa was weird and need I say more about Christopher Walken as King Louie?
Overall: While not as big a mess as Alice in Wonderland, the film does suffer through a lot of what made that film and the other mediocre reboots so frustrating: if you cannot remake the film better, then why remake it at all? The tone is all over the map, the casting is a mixed bag and the CGI is almost laughable, even in 2016. This film was certainly not as good as the original 1967 film, and definitely does not bode well for the film I am going to see tonight...especially seeing how I hold the original version of this film better than The Jungle Book. Man oh man, is Beauty and the Beast going to be a wild ride...
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