![]() They’re fine, but they feel like they were shoe-horned into the film for soundtrack licensing purposes, or as a sop to old-school mom-and-dad Jungle Book fans in the theater. In particular, a pair of musical numbers (Baloo’s “Bear Necessities” and Louie’s “I Wanna Be Like You”) that seem to come out of nowhere and stop the film’s momentum on a dime. My only beef with the film – and it’s a minor one – is that it felt the need to be too faithful to its Disney predecessor. ![]() He wants the boy handed over as tooth-for-a-tooth payback, otherwise all the jungle critters will get a dark tutorial about the circle of life pronto.ĭirected by Iron Man’s Jon Favreau, The Jungle Book is a tender and rollicking fable that manages to touch on some grown-up themes about man’s destructive power and the loss of youthful innocence without losing sight that it’s first and foremost a gee-whiz kids adventure – though definitely one that’s a bit too scary and intense for younger kids. It turns out that Shere Khan was burned and scarred by the “red flower” (the animals’ term for fire) once wielded by Mowgli’s father. Mowgli is reared according to the communal code of the wolfpack and lives in jungle harmony until a snarling, vengeful tiger, Shere Khan (Idris Elba, all East London-accented menace), comes looking for him. ![]() ![]() A faithful, albeit more mature reboot of Disney’s animated 1967 classic (well, “classic” actually seems too charitable of a word when measured against Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Snow White…let’s call it a “second-tier classic”), The Jungle Book stars the endearing 12-year-old Neel Sethi as Mowgli, an irrepressibly chatty “man-cub” who was raised in the wild by a pack of wolves led by Akela (Giancarlo Esposito) and Raksha (Lupita Nyong’o) after a fatherly black panther named Bagheera (Ben Kingsley) found him as an abandoned toddler. ![]()
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