Just to get them all out of the way at last, here's a bunch of mini-reviews of the features I screened in 2016, but never got around to properly reviewing. To wit: The Jungle Book, Nocturnal Animals, Denial, Sing Street, The Wailing, The Handmaiden, God's Not Dead 2
, and The Nice Guys.
(I guess I should be a gentleman and warn you, I get somewhat spoilery for The Wailing
and Nocturnal Animals.)
First up, we have Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book,
presumptively the best Disney live-action remake of a classic animated
film to date. I say "presumptively" because I didn't see Pete's Dragon, but, of course, neither did you, so you're not likely to care about any misattributed superlative on its account.
Either way, more than anything else, The Jungle Book is a fantabulous technical
exercise—albeit one that takes ages and ages to get used to, simply
because there's just no preparing yourself for the incongruous
and deeply upsetting sight of all these nearly-photorealistic CGI animals who flap their
lips in a simulacrum of speaking English. (And even after you've finally gotten your head around that, then you have to deal with
those two musical numbers, imported from the animated original, neither
one of which feels precisely on-target, and the latter of which does its
absolute damnedest, in conjunction with the film's abysmal
reimagination of King Louie as a Kongian kaiju, to ruin your fucking life.)
On the
other hand, you have Idris Elba's Shere Khan, monumentally terrifying,
though this has somewhat more to do with the sterling CGI performance, and
Favreau's willingness to stage some
genuine high-test brutality
in his kid's talking animal adventure, than it does with Elba's vocal
performance—although it is a rather good one. On that same hand, however, you have Scarlett Johannson's giant-sized Kaa, who is,
objectively speaking, probably just
as ridiculous a creation as King Louie—but
who
still comes off as a bolt of creepy horror-movie perfection, right in
The Jungle Book's heart. Best talking snake ever? Maybe. But the best use of the focal plane in a 2016 movie, hiding Kaa's body against the limbs of the tree Mowgli's found himself in, until the electric moment she begins to
move? Oh, almost without a
doubt. (And yet Kaa's success
is just as much thanks to Johannson's vocals. In combination with
Her, it
leads me to believe that the woman is a significantly better voice actor than she
is an actor-actor. Plus, if they'd kept
her musical number—which is relegated instead to the closing credits, even though it's by far the best of all three—it might have helped the other two feel even the slightest bit organic to the proceedings.)
Meanwhile, Bill Murray's pretty well-cast himself, as the lazy Baloo; and Ben Kingsley is likewise doing just fine with one more check-chasing late-career role, as the stolid Bagheera. As for that kid playing Mowgli, Neel Sethi, he is frankly doing
much better than he's gotten credit for: can you
imagine playing make-pretend on a set like this one, let alone at his age? He's fantastic.
And yet, if you throw in an ending that seems to be at
cross-purposes not only with the original text (whether "original" means
the Kipling tale or the '67 cartoon), but at cross-purposes with its own
themes and story, what you're ultimately left with is not that much more than one amazing-looking mess. (And one that probably needed an R-rating to really reach its full
potential, at that. I live and I dream, guys.) But it is amazing-looking, and that still counts, even in 2016. And so even all the things that you're bound to hate about it just don't
matter nearly as much as they really probably should.
Score: 7/10
