Director Jon Favreau runs quite faithfully to that first film – neither directly parallels Rudyard Kipling’s source text – and, thankfully, has kept in the brilliant songs, but adds some layers of complexity to it all. Sir Ben Kingsley got to know the director, Jon Favreau, while filming Iron Man 3. He says he chose the Indian-American star for The Jungle Book because the he had “tremendous charisma” and seemed “self-assured”.
Advertisement
The film follows the story of Mowgli, an orphaned boy who is raised by a black panther named Bagheera and a pack of wolves in the remote jungle of India.
Advertisement
As an evil tiger, Shere Khan, moves in and decides to hunt Mowgli, he must leave and learn to survive in the jungle. But he needed his Baloo, and so he set off on the quest for Bill Murray, who is a hard man to reach: “I wrote letters, left messages, communicated through third parties, it was like negotiating with a government you’re not supposed to negotiate with!” As Mowgli is always keeping an eye out for Shere Khan, he also faces a number of other challenges and foes along the way until he is finally forced to face the tiger once and for all in front of the entire jungle.Christopher Walken’s menacing version of King Louie recalls Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now as he looms large in a dark cave with his army of monkeys around him. We talked to Favreau on EW Radio ahead of his opening weekend, which is on track to nab more than $70 million for the three-day frame. But it now has some competition with this live-action and CGI blend that deserves an equally long life, largely because of its awe-inspiring vistas, amazingly realistic computer-rendered animals, and a pulsing heart that underlies it all. Not only is the movie fun and exciting, the scenery is absolutely breathtaking as well. There are definitely a few scenes that are very intense and have some jump scares, so parents should take caution with children under five years old. “But it’s certainly something I would love to be involved with”. It was whittled down a bit before it was presented to me so I didn’t see all of them, but he was one of the people that kind of popped.
