Review of The Jungle Book (2016) by Chad326 — 23 Apr 2016

As someone who loved the original jungle book as a kid, this was definitely a dissapointment for me, and not just because they took a very different tone than the original. While they made a valiant attempt, and there was clearly a good chunk of effort put into the movie, it definitely fell flat for me.

First off the format that they chose is extremely hard, because literally the whole movie is 1 kid on a green screen for the whole movie. think about that for a moment, the entire movie rests on the shoulders of Neel Sethi's acting, who while I think he did a very good job, he's still just a kid and that really really limits the quality of the movie, because no matter how good of an actor, no matter how much practice Neel has had, he's still just a 12 year old kid, he's not a professional actor. Now this worked just fine in the original jungle book because it was a kids movie, and everyone knew it was a kids movie. The new jungle book really tried to be a serious movie that adults would enjoy as well, and that's where I think its biggest flaw is.

This brings me to my next point which is the "realism" that they chose to implore. Now having life like animals that talk has always been a very rocky slope, there a lots of examples where it can go horribly wrong and not very many where it goes right. From the very opening scene that shows mowglie running through the forest, until the end of the movie you could pretty easily tell that even a lot of his movements.

Were cgi, which also took away from the experience for me, but my biggest qualm with the realism is that they tried so hard to make the movie realistic and then continued to allow very large plot holes. Mowglie is a human whos lived with animals all his life, and so because he's a human with no education of any kind he's a boy genius? without even pausing to think, he comes up with very intricate ways to engineer situations to his advantage, within the movie they just call it "his tricks" but I mean seriously, he suspends himself from a cliff with a vine as a rope, anchored by animals with a system of how the animals should move in order to put him in the right position to use a saw that he made to cut down chunks of honey, all without getting stung, but when he does he just completely brushes it off like it never happened, all of which he thought about for literally 30 seconds, less even, it took him 30 seconds to engineer and begin making this very intricate plan to get honey for baloo, and this is just the tip of the ice berg. throughout the movie the fact that he was such a boy genius and able to completely ignore pain (he was stung by at least 20 bees but still managed to get the honey, and then miraculously healed in 1 minute, and towards the end he gets a huge gash across his chest from shere khan (the antagonist/ tiger) says ow and then continues on as if nothing happened.

This was probably the biggest turn off for me, they seemed to try so hard to make the movie believable, but its a story about talking animals and a boy who's apparently the next genius of an era, and has the pain tolerance of 2 grown men combined. the original movie was just a fun kids movie that didn't try to be real, and I think thats the biggest distinction between the two.

I did think that the casting was exceptional, but I am a little biased against christopher walken, I think that the character of king louie could have been portrayed differently, and played a little better.