Not that I consider the original cartoon a classic. And I've never read Rudyard Kiplings novel. But this crap is far worse than the cartoon.
First of all, the cgi in a movie relying this much on cgi needs to be state of the art. But in fact its almost as horrible as Spawn and The Scorpion King. Everything from the animals to the jungle is cgi. The snake and the tiger are the only ones that look like real animals. Making Louie, the monkey king act and sound like a mob-boss and look like Christopher Walken who is the voice, is a little funny, but not enough to make me any less bored at that point in the movie. As for the rest of the animals, if you're doing a feature version of a cartoon with talking animals, you better have that talent and the money to make it look good. They had neither here. The wolves are the worst cgi animated animals I have ever seen. After last years Jurassic World, its hard to believe they can get it this bad. The scene where the water puts out the fire in the jungle looks more fake than the water in The day after tomorrow. A 12 year old movie.
The plot itself (I don't know how close this is to the novel) steals from a lot of other movies. And it does so shamelessly and bad. From The Lion King to Ice Age, there is nothing original here. The movie also doesn't know if it once to be a serious interpretation of the novel or a kiddie-friendly version. So it fails as both versions.
And hearing the law of the jungle or whatever the damn thing was said out loud 3 times during the movie was 3 times too many.
The kid playing Mowgli is annoyingly cute, annoyingly clean and way way too human for a boy that was raised by animals. I found myself being really annoyed in a scene where Mowgli sits on the bears stomach as it floats on a river. The bear splashes water at Mowgli but his hair never gets wet. Again, this was complete cgi and the fact that I noticed this, shows how bad that scene and the whole movie was. Had I been excited and given a rats ass about any of the characters, I probably wouldn't have noticed it.
If they had had a bigger budget and made the animals real (which means they can't talk and they hunt, kill and eat each other) and they had made Mowgli a wild boy with no language, acting like an animal and made it R-rated for adults, then MAYBE they could have made a decent movie.
The worst part of it all is that Jon Favreau, who gave us the original first and excellent Iron Man movie actually directed this crap.
Avoid it. Even if you have kids around the age, this movie is meant for. They will find it even more boring than most of the adult audience already finds it. Let them watch the cartoon instead. At least it was fun to watch for me when I was a kid.
Once again, I wish IMDb, would allow the possibility of zero stars. Or in the case of this movie stars below zero would be even more fitting.
First of all, the cgi in a movie relying this much on cgi needs to be state of the art. But in fact its almost as horrible as Spawn and The Scorpion King. Everything from the animals to the jungle is cgi. The snake and the tiger are the only ones that look like real animals. Making Louie, the monkey king act and sound like a mob-boss and look like Christopher Walken who is the voice, is a little funny, but not enough to make me any less bored at that point in the movie. As for the rest of the animals, if you're doing a feature version of a cartoon with talking animals, you better have that talent and the money to make it look good. They had neither here. The wolves are the worst cgi animated animals I have ever seen. After last years Jurassic World, its hard to believe they can get it this bad. The scene where the water puts out the fire in the jungle looks more fake than the water in The day after tomorrow. A 12 year old movie.
The plot itself (I don't know how close this is to the novel) steals from a lot of other movies. And it does so shamelessly and bad. From The Lion King to Ice Age, there is nothing original here. The movie also doesn't know if it once to be a serious interpretation of the novel or a kiddie-friendly version. So it fails as both versions.
And hearing the law of the jungle or whatever the damn thing was said out loud 3 times during the movie was 3 times too many.
The kid playing Mowgli is annoyingly cute, annoyingly clean and way way too human for a boy that was raised by animals. I found myself being really annoyed in a scene where Mowgli sits on the bears stomach as it floats on a river. The bear splashes water at Mowgli but his hair never gets wet. Again, this was complete cgi and the fact that I noticed this, shows how bad that scene and the whole movie was. Had I been excited and given a rats ass about any of the characters, I probably wouldn't have noticed it.
If they had had a bigger budget and made the animals real (which means they can't talk and they hunt, kill and eat each other) and they had made Mowgli a wild boy with no language, acting like an animal and made it R-rated for adults, then MAYBE they could have made a decent movie.
The worst part of it all is that Jon Favreau, who gave us the original first and excellent Iron Man movie actually directed this crap.
Avoid it. Even if you have kids around the age, this movie is meant for. They will find it even more boring than most of the adult audience already finds it. Let them watch the cartoon instead. At least it was fun to watch for me when I was a kid.
Once again, I wish IMDb, would allow the possibility of zero stars. Or in the case of this movie stars below zero would be even more fitting.