The bare necessities aren’t all quite there. Andy Serkis’ directs Christian Bale, Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Holland in a motion-capture adaptation that is stuck between being too dark for kids and too fluffy to be for adults. And yet…
Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, out now on Netflix, is stuffed to the gills with life. Each encountered beast, from a world-weary Indian wolf to a vengeful elephant, could easily ground their own theoretical chapter.
Ultimately, it’s for the bes. To director the credit of Andy Serkis, whose journey as the motion-capture actor behind Gollum, King Kong, and Caesar in the rebooted Apes trilogy landed him in the director’s seat, the film doesn’t linger on any one animal. It’s titled Mowgli for a reason.
The film, based on Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories, puts the young boy (played by Rohan Chand) front and center. Raised by wolves, as well as a well-meaning bear and black panther, Mowgli is wild as can be, but struggles to gain the acceptance of the pack; no amount of training can obscure the fact that he’s still human. Then there’s the matter of Bengal tiger Shere Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch), who killed Mowgli’s mother and has it out for the kid, too, endangering the pack by association.
Though, as in Disney’s adaptations of The Jungle Book, the animals speak and cooperate with each other, the tone of Mowgli hews a little starker. That isn’t to say that this is a “dark and gritty” read on the material; rather, it’s still a fairytale, but one clearly conscious of its roots in British Imperialism in India. The root of the conflict between man and beast has as much to do with the inherent divide between walking on two legs and four as much as the way that the spread of civilization (at least as defined by the British Empire) threatens to erode and irrevocably change nature.
