I am not privy to the inner workings of the Disney creative team, but I have a feeling their process is as follows: they develop an idea and pitch it at a Marvel movie. If it doesn’t work there, they try to develop it into an animated feature. If the idea doesn’t fit there, they try to mold it to their still-freshly acquired Star Wars franchise. And if none of those works, it is begrudgingly transformed into a live-action remake of a Disney classic.
Thus is the unfortunate fate of "The Jungle Book." It is a once great idea that has been put through its paces a few too many times and came out a formless lump that Disney handed off to director Jon Favreau and begged him to make something marketable out of. To his credit, Favreau does manage to pull it off, but his end product is far from unscathed by the adaptation to live-action.
The story follows the original Rudyard Kipling novel about as well as the 1967 animated Disney movie. Mowgli (Neel Sethi) is a man-cub lost in the jungles of India who is raised by the panther Bagheera (Ben Kingsley) and a wolf pack headed by Akela (Giancarlo Esposito) and Raksha (Lupita Nyong’o). He grows up feeling left out and disassociated from his pack, but considers the jungle his home and its laws the rules by which he must live. However, the return of the sadistic tiger Shere Khan (Idris Elba) puts his family in jeopardy, and Mowgli elects to leave. As he traverses through the jungle towards the man-village, he encounters the lovably lazy bear Baloo (Bill Murray), the hypnotic boa constrictor Kaa (Scarlet Johansson) and the ambitious giant orangutan King Louie (Christopher Walken).
While Sethi plays a live-action Mowgli, all other characters are CGI and despite looking spectacular, it rarely manages to clear the uncanny valley. The visibly rippling muscles under Shere Khan’s back are eerily real, but Baloo’s fur is just a hair too shaggy and Baghera’s eyes are a bit too stationary.
The settings are another story entirely, each background looking gorgeous and authentic. The jungle itself is wondrous and the cinematography works well to show it off with lots of tight movements and wide tracking shots. The sound design is the only real technical aspect of the film that flat out fails, but it suffers from the curse of being a live action remake. The movie is forced to interject the swing sound from the 60s original which clashes violently with the darker look of the movie. There are only two songs included in the picture, but they are sung by Murry and Walken, neither of whom can carry a tune for more than a few beats before being lost in their own nuance. That being said, I don’t know if I’ve ever witnessed anything as bizarrely hilarious as Christopher Walken struggling to sing "I Wanna Be Like You" and just wheezing through the song’s iconic scat sections. The score doesn’t have such humor and therefore isn’t much better than the singing, most of it just being "Bare Necessities" played at various keys and tempos.
A few lines are memorable and a few jokes work, including a few hilarious lines from the late Garry Shandling, but most of the dialogue in the film is repetitive, clichéd or both. Fortunately, where the script fails, the actors often manage to succeed. The performances seem to fall into distinct extremes. Elba, who I’m starting to think couldn’t give a bad performance if he tried, is genuinely intimidating and diabolical as Shere Khan and Murray is completely laid back and at home as Baloo. Nyong’o and Esposito, in particular, give powerhouse voiceovers. Both are given a lot of room to play with and while Esposito fills it with the sincere presence of a diplomatic and collected leader, Nyong’o takes the cake as a pure, vocal embodiment of maternal instinct. On the other hand, however, Kingsley could not possibly sound more bored and Johansson gives her most monotone performance to date. I give major kudos to Walken for at least trying, but he is handed broken material to play with and ultimately is as far from being as cool as Louis Prima as I am from being as cool as Christopher Walken. Standing smack dab in the middle of the two extremes stands Sethi himself, who comes armed with an expressive face and a definitive screen presence, but is hindered by an insufferable voice and an over the top style which doesn’t work when placed next to the unsettling animation.
Ultimately, the film works, but only because of a few solid casting choices, some creative camera work, and a director who knows how to handle both. It is what it was always meant to be: a kids’ movie with a nostalgia factor that has enough interesting visuals, ideas, and performances to keep the parents from yawning. 3/5
