The Jungle Book (AKA Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book)

Dir: Stephen Sommers

1994

**

Disney's 1967 The Jungle Book was the first film I ever saw in the cinema and I have a real soft spot for it. If a live-action remake announcement had been made for any other of my animated childhood favourites I would have been outraged but it was important to remember that The Jungle Book wasn't really Disney's creation and a pure adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's original work was well over due. I remember the trailer being pretty impressive too and I was quite impressed with the cast that included John Cleese, Sam Neill, Cary Elwes, Jason Flemyng, a young Lena Headley who I had quite a thing for and a young Jason Scott Lee who had made quite a name for himself after playing Bruce Lee in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story the year before. I knew that the animals wouldn't be able to talk in this version and nor was there going to be song but that was fine by me, a faithful adaptation was okay with me and the fact that it was titled Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book convinced me it would be. Spoiler alert. It is even further from Kipling's original than Disney's 1967 all singing, all dancing animated version. It was nice to see real animals, this was early days for CGI and thankfully there is very little of it, but everything else is just wrong. None of the characters really come out, Baloo is just a bear and Mowgli is a man in his late twenties. Most of the characters are brand new, human and have very little to do with the jungle. The acting is fairly shocking and the script is abysmal. There is a sense that they were trying to make a 1940's boys adventure story, much like Indiana Jones, rather than adapt the original stories. It wasn't too unpopular at the time, I remember hating it and it really hasn't aged well. It’s typical of the early nineties, make a cheap live-action remake of something, stating that it is an adaptation of the original, that results in a mess of a film that is nothing like the source material or as good as the first non-faithful adaptation.