Mowgli fails to even get a climactic fight with Shere Khan, Shere Khan just bows down and anti-climactically acknowledges him as the King of the Jungle. The greatest crime for Rudyard Kipling purists is that the animals are pushed to the background and crucially do not get to speak. However, everything – from the love interest to the lost city to the arrogant military officer – is played predictably. It tells essentially the same story as the Korda version but brings the British Colonial theme to the foreground. Where the film falters is in the predictability of its story. There is a great deal of fun to watching his animal impersonations. He creates a great audience rapport, not to mention being amazingly lithe and well-muscled. He is a wonderfully quick and alert actor on screen, his best expression usually being one of complete surprise. (The Hawaiian-born Lee is an actor of extraordinarily fluid nationality, having been cast as everything from Chinese to Polynesian to, here, an Indian). Stephen Sommers has great aid in the person of Jason Scott Lee.
The lost city with its decayed ruins, its death traps, its opulent treasures, giant snakes and hosts of CGI monkeys running about is surely the ultimate Lost City conducted to film.
The journey to the lost city that takes up the last quarter of the film has an exciting, magnificently sustained tension in the best tradition of the Indiana Jones films. Stephen Sommers directs with a fantastic sense of adventure. It is a vision of India that is more beautiful than the real one could ever have been – some of the Indian-shot natural vistas across the jungle and night valleys have been dressed with visual effects to make them even more exquisite. The jungles of the Exotic East have never looked more beautiful, Colonial India has never seemed more majestic and the animals (many of which are animatronic figures indistinguishable from the real thing) never more stunningly real.
This version is an extraordinarily sumptuous production. This was the third film version of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894) – the Disney animated version The Jungle Book (1967) was the second and had been preceded by an earlier live-action version Jungle Book (1942) from producer Alexander Korda. It was followed by other live-action remakes such as 101 Dalmatians (1996), Maleficent (2014), Cinderella (2015), Pete’s Dragon (2016), Beauty and the Beast (2017), Aladdin (2019), Dumbo (2019), Lady and the Tramp (2019), The Lion King (2019) and Mulan (2020), as well as revivals of live-action films such as Flubber (1997), That Darn Cat (1997), Freaky Friday (2003), Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005), The Shaggy Dog (2006), Race to Witch Mountain (2009), Tron Legacy (2010) and Mary Poppins Returns (2018). In a trend that was no doubt inspired by the success of Steven Spielberg’s Hook (1991), The Jungle Book was the first in a fad where Disney started remaking their animation classics in live-action.
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