By: Declan Hertel Entertainment Editor
From the moment the first trailer for “The Jungle Book” dropped, I wanted it so freaking badly. I have no especially great love for the 1967 version, beyond enjoying it as a child, but this new take on it looked gorgeous and had a killer voice cast, and I’d been super stoked for it since. So as the lights went down on a Friday afternoon screening, I found myself giddy, hoping that this movie would be as awesome as I had imagined it would.
And you know what, it came pretty darn close. This is a solid flick.
My favorite thing about this new version, directed by Jon Favreau (“Iron Man”), is that it doesn’t care that it’s gorgeous. James Cameron’s “Avatar” blew us all away in 2009 with its spectacular visuals, but honestly, it knew that’s really the only thing it had going for it: it looked stupid good.
“The Jungle Book,” for my money, looks better. But it doesn’t care. Painstaking effort was put into making it seem like this movie was shot by real people in real places with real cameras starring real animals. It’s not out to show off, it’s out to tell a good story, and just happens to feature visuals that would have been unthinkable five years ago.
As for telling a good story, this is where the movie falls slightly (but just slightly) short. In this age where blockbuster films are—seemingly as a rule—two and a half fugging hours long, I feel weird saying this, but here goes: I wish “The Jungle Book” was longer.
Coming in at a tidy one hour and 40 minutes, “The Jungle Book” certainly doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it also leaves too soon. When I say I wish it was longer, I don’t mean they should tack on another 20 minutes; I mean that I wanted another 30 seconds here, two minutes there, so that they could flesh out the great, great stuff they’ve got. Not more content, but fuller content. All the makings are there for a wonderful epic: it’s just not epic enough. I have fantasies of a director’s cut, but I realize that’s kind of a silly notion.
Personally, the visuals are worth the price of admission; just because the film doesn’t draw attention to them doesn’t mean they aren’t attention-grabbing. The voice performances are invariably great and delightfully understated (particularly Christopher Walken as a big-ass ape), and newcomer Neel Sethi—merely 10 years old—does a truly admirable job of carrying the film. I would love to see him get more work and improve his already pretty notable abilities.
I could say an awful lot more about the film, from the individual characters, to the perfect inclusion of “Bear Necessities,” to the slightly weird inclusion of “I Wanna Be Like You,” to the multiple questions raised by basing a mass-market movie in 2016 on a work steeped in the attitudes of a deeply racist time (next week in editorials), but alas—I’m almost out of words. Suffice to say “The Jungle Book” is a solid, highly enjoyable flick.
Contact the author at dhertel11@wou.edu or on Twitter @JournalFunTimes.
