Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle’ on Netflix, Easily the Scariest Thing to Show Your Kids This Weekend

Look, it’s not like Disney has a leg to stand on when it comes to unnecessary re-imaginings of their animated classics. And the story of man-cub Mowgli and his adventures in the jungle existed in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book long before Disney turned Baloo into a singing, dancing bear. Still, with Disney having hit the jackpot so recently on a live-action/animated hybrid remake of The Jungle Book, to the tune of nearly a billion dollars worldwide, the idea of director Andy Serkis throwing his own motion-capture suit into the ring could feel a bit extraneous. But freed from the demands to include Disney’s musical trappings, Serkis is definitely free to shine a light on other themes of this classic “boy of/outside the the jungle” story. Is it worth going back into the jungle again?

MOWGLI: LEGEND OF THE JUNGLE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Based on Rudyard Kipling’s venerable tales, Mowgli is an infant boy who survives the massacre of his family by the vicious tiger Shere Khan, and with no one to go to, he’s taken in by a pack of wolves and eventually cared for by a kind of jungle coalition, including pack leader Akela, stern panther Bagheera, and the comparatively more amiable (though nothing like the freewheeling layabout from Disney) Baloo. With Shere Khan constantly threatening Mowgli’s life, Bagheera and Akela ultimately tough-love Mowgli into leaving the pack and going to live in the man village, where Mowgli is put face-to-face with man’s cruelty. Ultimately, a final showdown with Shere Khan awaits.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I’ll give you two guesses. Obviously, both previous Disney versions are always on your mind as you watch, even if it’s just to point out the differences. That this comes so hot on the heels of the 2016 Disney version means there is no great technological leap forward to distinguish the two films. Instead, Serkis opts for verisimilitude, of all curious things in a story about a boy who talks to the animals. The violence in Mowgli definitely seems to be a feature, as everything from a training chase (where Bagheera goes fully feral in order to force Mowgli to leave the pack for his safety) to the climactic battle against Shere Khan has sharp edges and hot blood ready to burst forth at every moment.

But it’s more than just the earlier Jungle Books that this will remind you of. Serkis made his name by playing Gollum in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, and there are more than a few nods to those blockbusters, particularly in the form of the giant python, Kaa, who is voiced by Cate Blanchett and whose opening, scene-setting narration is so reminiscent of Blanchett as Galadriel, narrating the opening to The Fellowship of the Ring that it has to be intentional. Later, when there’s an action sequence in Kaa’s cave lair, there are touches of the scenes spent battling the dragon Smaug in The Hobbit.

Performance Worth Watching: Speaking of which, Benedict Cumberbatch, who voiced Smaug so memorably in those Hobbit films, voices the beast Shere Khan here, though it’s to sadly diminished effect. Cumberbatch snarls and simmers, but there’s not much distinctive here, and it doesn’t hold a candle to Idris Elba’s boot-quaking scariness in the same role in The Jungle Book. A-List voices abound elsewhere, from Blanchett as Kaa, Christian Bale as Bagheera, Peter Mullan as Akela, Naomie Harris as Mowgli’s wolf-mom, Tom Hollander as an opportunistic hyena, and Serkis himself as Baloo. Mullan and Blanchett are likely duking it out for top honors, though a should to Louis Ashbourne Serkis playing Bhoot, the albino runy wolf cub who befriends Mowgli best of all and who gets treated rather poorly.

Memorable Dialogue: “We can’t all be scholars,” seems like a fairly innocuous phrase, but as delivered by Matthew Rhys, playing the human hunter, mere moments after Mowgli makes a particularly macabre discovery in the human camp. Rhys is dispassionate but also, in his drunken state, vaguely threatening.

 

Single Best Shot: One of the signatures of Serkis’s Mowgli is how remarkably violent it is. So violent! Not quite as violent as a movie about a boy being the focal point of a battle between tigers, wolves, panthers, hyenas, bears, elephants, and a giant snake could be, but for a movie still ostensibly pitched at families and which, until recently, was the sole province of family entertainment? Yeah, there’s some violence onboard. The action scenes where Mowgli is in danger are legitimately scary, and probably traumatic for very little kids, so buyer beware. If the above, emblematic gif of a dazed post-battle Mowgli soaking his deep gashes and flayed skin in a pool of water doesn’t give you a good sense of the level the movie is operating on, it should.

Sex and Skin: n/a

Our Take: Freed from any fealty to Disney, Serkis’s Mowgli is able to push some buttons that the original didn’t. Bagheera and Baloo’s conflict over how Mowgli should be raised has scary high stakes to it, and Kaa is a more interesting character than the hypnotizing tree snake from Disney. And then there are the scenes in the man’s village, where Rhys strikes a dark, foreboding figure. It’s still hard to find a whole lot of reason for this movie to exist. The messages about human cruelty or encroaching imperialism or finding your own pack that appear in Mowgli don’t depart all that much from earlier versions, so there’s little thematic reason for it to exist. Technologically, you might hope that Serkis’s presence might have led to a great leap forward for mo-cap, but the most striking thing about the animation, at least to me, was Shere Khan looking like a dead ringer for Alita: Battle Angel with those uncanny-valley eyes.

 

Our Call: Definitely think it over before traumatizing your kids with it (unless that’s what you want to do, which: fair), but unless you’re a giant Jungle Book aficionado and crave completism, you can Skip It.

Stream Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle on Netflix