Awesome Movie

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Despite diverging in many ways from Kipling's classic novel, I love this film, and feel that it holds up well since when I was a child. It's been almost ten years since I last saw it and my affection for it hasn't declined. I cannot fathom why Disney hasn't attempted to revive it for a new release. It truly deserves more love.One night in the jungles of India, Shere Khan the tiger attacks a convoy of soldiers of the British Empire whom Mowgli and his father were guiding. As a boy, Mowgli is smitten by the Colonel's young daughter, Kitty. In the chaos, Mowgli and his wolf cub Grey Brother are separated from the convoy and his father killed by the tiger and lost in the jungle. Bagheera the panther discovers the pair and leads them to the wolf pack where they are adopted as members of the pack. Mowgli also adopts a young Baloo as his brother. Mowgli grows up in the jungle and discovers his childhood sweetheart Kitty wandering through the jungle accompanied by her suitor, Captain William Boone. Mowgli follows her back to the British fort and his captured by Boone, but is freed on Kitty's request and is taught by her and Dr Plumford the power of speech and the ways of civilization, and Mowgli begins to fall in love with her over time. Captain Boone learns from Mowgli of the location of the lost Monkey City and its treasure within. Unable to adjust to life amidst the British aristocracy and saddened by Boone's proposal to Kitty, Mowgli returns to the jungle. However, Boone hatches a plan to lure Mowgli back to lead them to the lost city.Famous Kipling elements such as the Law of the Jungle, the red flower as a symbol for fire and an affinity for nature are carried over which I believe makes it more genuine. Jason Scott Lee is emotive, innocent and sincere as Mowgli, and while I'm aware he's not Indian, I feel his performance solidifies his place in the role he truly feels closer in spirit to Kipling than the animated Mowgli (though I do very much like the animated film). Lena Headey is very likable as Kitty and has great chemistry with Jason, Cary Elwes is sinister and callous as the traitorous Boone, and Sam Neill and John Cleese both add humour and quintessential British charm to the film, especially Cleese in his interactions with Mowgli.As any good film should I was swept up in the action, emotions and characters and being an animal lover I always rooted for Mowgli and his friends. While I was scared as a child at first, I still revisited for it's adventurous spirit and rewarding ending. I'd even go so far to say as this is Stephen Sommers' best film, balancing the more sentimental scenes with serious action and tension very nicely. The animal training is flawless; Shere Khan is an appropriately menacing force of nature, Grey Brother, Baloo and Bagheera are warm, benevolent brothers to Mowgli, and King Louie steals the show whenever he's on screen. The jungle and fort locations have a rich atmosphere and provide some beautiful visual elements, benefitting from actual location scouting in India. Basil Poledouris provides a romantic and exciting score that honestly deserves more attention, underlining the action scenes and moments of affection between Mowgli and Kitty. At 1 hour 50 minutes, it feels very nicely paced and manages to keep investment going.My real problem with the movie is that, truth be told, this isn't really Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book as the title would suggest. It can be too violent for a younger audience at times with the villains, Shere Khan, Kaa and the traps within the temple, and there are some instances of mild profanity but nothing I was especially disturbed by. And I suppose some people may be put off due to the fact that Sommers borrowed more from Tarzan (with Kitty as Jane) and Indiana Jones (with the human villains, temple and treasure) as opposed to Kipling that the movie's core concept does feel less original and the performances are just generally good enough to carry the story. Arguably its the best live action Tarzan film to date, only with an Indian setting, but it still pulls it off very effectively. Because of that same adventurous style, engaging visuals, romantic score and likable animal and human characters I still rate 1994's 'The Jungle Book' very highly and intend to watch it again soon.

One of my favourite films as a child was the Disney cartoon of "The Jungle Book", largely because I was so amused by the antics of the singing, dancing animals- I probably knew off by heart all the lyrics to "The Bear Necessities" and "I Wanna Be Like You"- so I decided to watch this live-action version when it was recently shown on television. Although it is described as a remake of the 1967 film, the plot has been considerably altered. This film is officially known as "Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book", in line with the common nineties practice of prefixing the author's name to the titles of films based on works of literature, a practice which appears to have been adopted for technical copyright reasons but which was often interpreted as a promise that the film would be more faithful to the original text than earlier adaptations had been. Sometimes, as in "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein", this promise was kept, but in other cases it certainly was not. The so-called "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet", for example, is much more Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo and Juliet" than it is Shakespeare's.Similarly, "Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book" is only loosely based on Kipling's stories. In the original book, and in the cartoon, the hero, Mowgli, was a young boy. Here he is an adult, a sort of Indian Tarzan who has been raised by animals in the jungle after being accidentally lost there as a boy. The villain of the piece, both in Kipling's version and in Disney's, was the savage, man-eating tiger Shere Khan. Here Shere Khan is presented more as a sort of elemental force of nature, the enforcer of the Law of the Jungle, and the real villain is Captain William Boone, a renegade British army officer obsessed with finding a lost city in the jungle where, rumour has it, a vast treasure is waiting to be discovered. As Mowgli is here a Tarzan-figure he has to have his Jane, and one is provided for him in the shape of Kitty Brydon, his childhood sweetheart and the daughter of Boone's commanding officer. Most of the animals familiar from the cartoon and the original stories are here- not only Shere Khan but also Akela the wolf, Bagheera the black panther and Baloo the bear. Baloo is generally assumed to be a sloth bear, the only species of bear found in the area of central India in which Kipling set his stories, but here he is a brown bear, and Kipling certainly describes him as brown. In the Disney version he was a generic cartoon bear, of no recognisable species. This film also perpetuates a goof which originated in the cartoon by introducing a character not found in Kipling, King Louie, the orang-utan king of the monkeys. (Orang-utans are not found anywhere in India). In this version the animals are seen interacting with the human characters, but they do not speak, and certainly do not sing and dance. There are certain costume dramas films which reveal more about the period in which they were made than they do about the period in which they are ostensibly made, and this is one of them. The action takes place in the late Victorian or Edwardian era, but the film reflects two of the preoccupations of the late twentieth century, environmentalism and anti-colonialism. Kipling, for whom the "Law of the Jungle" meant preserving the balance of nature (not the dog-eat-dog tyranny of the strong over the weak, which is what the phrase has come to mean today), might have approved of the first concept, but I doubt if he would have had much time for a film set in colonial India in which all the British characters, with the exception of Kitty and the kindly Dr Plumford, are all shown either as villains or as silly asses. Lack of fidelity to a literary source is not always a bad thing; there have been plenty of films which have played fast-and-loose with their source material and which have nevertheless ended up as good as, or even better than, the original book. The "Jungle Book" cartoon, for example, was hardly faithful to Kipling, but was still one of the best Disney cartons of its era. This live action version is not in the same class. The storyline is a derivative hybrid of Tarzan and Indiana Jones, and the acting was disappointing, with only John Cleese's Plumford standing out. Lena Headey as Kitty lacked the charisma she showed in "Waterland" a couple of years earlier, and Jason Scott Lee as Mowgli looks wrong for the part. If Mowgli is supposed to be Indian, why was a Chinese-Hawaiian cast in the role? If they couldn't find an Indian actor in Hollywood, they should have tried Bollywood. Although the film was aimed at a family audience it does not really seem suitable for young children, both in terms of levels of violence and in terms of sexual references. (There is a running joke about a soldier who is continually getting kicked in the testicles to a cry of "Ooh, me sweets!"). "Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book" is the sort of film that does not really succeed on either level, either as a faithful record of the book or as an adventure film in its own right. More bungle book than jungle book. 5/10

This is an interesting movie but I was rather misled when I came to hire it. I assumed that the original Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling had a lot of Christian anecdotes in it, though I have never read it. Upon seeing this movie I thought that it would be based closed to the book and with the suggestion of a couple of others, decided to show this film to a group of kids at an Easter Mission at Normanville. They said the movie was okay but as I watched it I was regretting that I actually chose this movie. I thought that it would have Christian anecdotes but it did not. I had a gut feeling that it did not follow the book and after reading Ebert's review I discovered that I was right. Basically, I should have shown three Vegetale videos instead.This movie seems to follow more of an Indiana Jones style movie than anything else. It contains lost treasure filled cities brimming with traps and an evil imperial empire seeking to find it and steal it for themselves. The place is the far reaches of India during the time of the British occupation and they are seeking to tame the wild land with their civilisation. This is the one theme of the movie that stands out and it is the taming of the wild. The jungle is wild and the British seek to tame it. The only problem is is that they cannot. The Black Jungle is the place which nobody enters because it is untameable.The story focuses on a boy named Mogli who is lost as a child during a tiger attack on a camp. He grows up in the jungle with a wolf, a bear, and a panther. These animals are his close friends but they seem to fall into the background when Mogli returns to civilisation. This is when the British decide to attempt to civilise him. At first they don't want to, they would rather beat him up until he shows them to the treasure, but later, when it is discovered that he was the child of somebody who saved the major's life, he is then released and they attempt to civilise him.I think it is bad to deceive an audience by the title of a movie, and I don't know how the ratings people hand out ratings, but I thought that this was not really a children's movie with the amount of blood, people sinking into quicksand and being buried alive in temple traps.

My family used to own this on VHS, but I watched it to death. So I was pretty happy when I found it on YouTube. It wasn't the best version, but it didn't matter. I could still recite most of the dialog from memory. This is much much better than the animated "Jungle Book" to me because it's so much more real. Real live animals, real jungle flora, it's just perfect. I also didn't know who John Cleese was at the time, but now I can appreciate his excellent sense of humor.Mowgli and Katherine have such wonderful chemistry as well. They have a history, and it's easier to feel for characters who do. The soldiers were well cast, with Harley being my favorite. While I prefer Cary Elwes in "The Princess Bride," he's still a good lead and bad guy. I highly recommend this to anyone who hasn't seen it yet.