Movie Review: This updated version of “The Jungle Book” feels all too familiar.
There’s a lot of spectacle but curiously little awe in Disney’s slick new reboot of “The Jungle Book,” a film that employs state-of-the-art special effects and solid voice work in service of a story that is ultimately disheartening in its familiarity and reliance on played-out tropes. It’s hard to actively dislike a movie that features such beautiful CGI renderings of its imaginary landscapes, and indeed, the elaborately realized jungle ecosystem of Jon Favreau’s colorful update is the best thing about the picture on a whole. It’s just that this “Jungle Book,” beneath the razzle-dazzle that exists on its surface, doesn’t give us a whole lot to latch on to. There’s nothing novel or interesting about the movie’s many twists, and after a while, all the visual pyrotechnics in the world can’t disguise a story that was perhaps best left alone.
In theory, a guy like Jon Favreau is an ideal fit to bring this material to life. Favreau has a habit of oscillating between small-scale, personal projects like “Made” and “Chef” and the more demanding mainstream likes of “Cowboys and Aliens” and the “Iron Man” movies, and he’s done so with a fair amount of ease in the past. He’s relatively adept at marrying big-screen action hoopla with palpable emotion, and on paper, he’s the guy you’d hire if you were a studio looking to make this property viable again. And yet my issues with this “Jungle Book” are not necessarily with what Favreau has brought to the table — he’s a very talented director — but rather, with the very idea of the enterprise itself. I think this version of “The Jungle Book” is probably about as good as it should be — which is to say, not very. The question of whether or not we need another iteration of this story is, for myself, a fairly easy one to answer. Creative bankruptcy has been one of the biggest problems in Hollywood for almost a decade now, and it shows no signs of waning anytime soon. Of course, movies like “The Jungle Book” that are essentially well-made corporate products are not helping matters much in this regard, though that won’t stop millions of people from seeing the movie anyway. And so this is the “Jungle Book” we have for now: visually ravishing but curiously shallow, an attempt at rugged realism that nevertheless bears the scent of contrivance.
The movie’s meshing of its human story with its animatronic characters and heightened sense of realism definitely takes some getting used to. It’s strange, for instance, to hear the familiar baritone of “Breaking Bad’s” Giancarlo Esposito emerging from the jaws of a silver-haired wolf, just as it feels somehow wrong to hear Ben Kingsley’s regal speech being spoken by benevolent panther (are there any other kind?) named Bagheera. And yet the movie starts out by establishing a loose, likable rhythm: not surprisingly, given Favreau’s deft hand with light, conversation-based humor, the early scenes where the animals just hang out and shoot the shit are inarguably the film’s most successful. It’s when he tries to introduce some kind of organic dramatic development to the narrative that he ends up stumbling.
The movie’s Mowgli, a bright-eyed newcomer named Neel Sethi, is also a fine fit. Yet, as I sit here to write this review, I struggle to conceive of a serviceable logline to describe exactly what happens over the course of “The Jungle Book”. For arcane reasons having to do with his ancestry, Mowgli is pursued by the fearsome tiger Shere Khan (Idris Elba, voicing his second animated animal of the year after the incalculably superior “Zootopia”). Shere Khan is a scarred warrior who rules his slice of the land through ruthless intimidation and is fearful of any form of human encroachment (man, after “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” the scorned-animal-who-bears-grudge-against-human-captors is a trope I’m getting really tired of). Our young hero eventually runs afoul of Balloo, (a well-cast Bill Murray) a sort of con-artist brown bear who eventually enlists Mowgli to fetch honey for the upcoming winter and goes on to teach the kid about the “bare necessities” of life, leading to this movie’s obligatory rehash of the original’s most famous musical number. The movie’s climax is uncharacteristically dour, a sort of flame-bathed action showdown that simultaneously feels rushed and unearned and evaporates almost as quickly as it came onscreen.
I’m sure there will be children for whom this new version of “The Jungle Book” is something of a wonder, and perhaps I’m just an old, cynical grump who can’t have a good time at the movies anymore. But while it’s hard to deny the technical mastery that has gone into realizing the “Jungle” of the title, I’m a little confused as to who the creators of this “Jungle Book” really believe the film is meant for. On one hand, this is a very dark, comparatively “real” version of the story, and there are many sequences, such as a disturbing moonlit passage in which Shere Kahn threatens a quivering pack of wolf cubs, that will be much too scary for small children. And yet I would venture that most adults will quickly tire of the movie’s fairly predictable kiddie movie schematics, and there’s none of the devastating subtext or adult humor here that you’ll find in say, the best Pixar films. I’m fairly certain there’s an oblique reference to the introduction of Colonel Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now” when Mowgli pays a visit to King Louie, a towering Orangutan voiced by Christopher Walken as if trying to revive Frank White from “King of New York,” but will any kids get the reference? Once the adults get the reference, does this allusion add anything to the story, beyond a brief wink and an acknowledgement of a better movie? Like James Cameron’s “Avatar,” “The Jungle Book” is a work of exquisite visual beauty that boasts almost no engaging story to speak of, and so the generous work that has gone into realizing its pictorial vision is all but for moot.
“The Jungle Book” is not lazy hackwork, even though it’s been designed with the explicit purposes of making money and jumpstarting a potential franchise. Favreau has a way with actors, and he gets good work out of many of the cast members, mainly Murray and Elba, who are actually afforded the opportunity to develop characters with three-dimensional arcs instead of simply reading off lines to advance the plot. And the movie’s visual majesty cannot be denied or overstated; its blend of the real and the uncanny is so seamless as to be practically invisible. And yet all the illustrative splendor in the world doesn’t mean a thing if we don’t care about what’s happening onscreen. This new “Jungle Book” is pretty to look at, but its charms begin to fade when you examine it too closely. C+
