In other words, there’s no real need for another Jungle Book, which makes this new one's job even harder. The story itself isn't too dramatically different from the familiar Disney animated film. Our hero Mowgli (Neel Sethi, delightfully vivacious and chatty) is a young boy who’s been raised by a family of wolves ever since the black panther Bagheera (voiced by Ben Kingsley) found him abandoned in the woods. Living as a wolf isn't easy: Mowgli grows up slowly, can’t resist the temptation to use tools and has to make into instinct the things that wolves just
That communal impulse is threatened when
In keeping with the spirit of Kipling, the structure is largely episodic. That choice could result in tedium onscreen, but it works here, giving us ample opportunity to luxuriate in the cast's star personas. Murray’s bear is a riff on his usual scheming layabout; Johansson’s snake vamps it up as she slithers and
But the true wonder of The Jungle Book lies in what might be called its very blockbuster-ness — the way it fully immerses us in this world, utilizing state-of-the-art effects (the talking, emoting animals look amazing and real) and juggling levity,
He does something similar here. As Mowgli runs through dense fields and forests, the camera often stays so close to the boy’s point of view that we don’t always see what’s pursuing him — a classic tactic Favreau and others probably learned from its most brilliant practitioner, Steven Spielberg. But the film has a stirring, storybook grandeur as well, particularly in its rhapsodic portraits of animal togetherness, which in turn helps sell all that dialogue about unity and the power of the pack.
These franchise movies usually have to be all things to all viewers: fun for the kids, gritty for the grown-ups, snarky for the teens. Very often, that results in an inchoate sprawl of competing tones and set pieces. But The Jungle Book is fast and light. It manages to be just scary enough to make us feel the danger of solitude in the middle of a massive jungle, but never indulgent or gratuitous. At one pivotal point, Shere Khan kills a major character by biting into and then quickly casting the body off a cliff. It happens swiftly, suddenly and without any melodrama: You can imagine that the filmmakers and the studio don’t want to upset younger viewers too much by focusing too much on death. Yet the offhand cruelty of this character’s speedy dispatch has a real sting, too. If only all blockbusters could be this exciting, engrossing and beautiful.