Review: KEANU

KEANU
(COMEDY/ACTION)
2.5 out of 4 stars 
Directed by Peter Antencio
Starring: Jordan Peele, Keegan-Michael Key, Tiffany Haddish, Method Man, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Jason Mitchell, Jamar Malachai Neighbors, Will Forte, Luis Guzman, Nia Long
Rated R for violence, language throughout, drug use and sexuality/nudity.
98 minutes
Verdict: While uneven and not quite on par with their TV work, the inaugural feature film effort from Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele and Peter Atencio is a funny and absurd crime comedy centering around an adorable kitten.
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN KEANU IF YOU LIKED:
Key and Peele  (TV series, 2012-2015)
PINEAPPLE EXPRESS  (2008)
21 JUMP STREET  (2012)
THE HANGOVER  (2009)
TED  (2012)
Following an excellent run with their truly absurd but often very astute Comedy Central series Key and Peele, which concluded last September, the comedy team of Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key with director Peter Atencio are reunited in this similarly absurd feature film, written by Peele with fellow Key and Peele writer, Alex Rubens.  Centering around a pair of hapless suburbanites infiltrating the Los Angeles gang scene in order to get their stolen kitten back, the premise has a lot of promise, but despite having mastered TV sketch comedy, their inaugural big screen feature film proves more rickety.  The story and characters are not unlike the sort that might appear in one of their TV skits, but the results are uneven and inconsistent in the feature format.  Even as such, they derive a lot of mileage from the delightfully daft premise and colorful characters, scoring more laughs than they miss.
Peele stars as Rell, a pot-smoking photographer recently dumped by his girlfriend, but when an adorable kitten appears on his doorstep, he names it Keanu, and little feline reignites his life with meaning.  A couple of weeks later, Rell goes out with his uptight cousin and best pal Clarence (played by Key), whose wife and kid are out of town for the weekend, but when they return to Rell's house that night, they find it ransacked and Keanu gone.  Desperate to get his kitten back, Rell drags Clarence along to interrogate his neighbor/weed dealer Hulka (Will Forte), who reveals the raid was performed by the "Blips", a street gang led by one named Cheddar (Method Man), who mistakes Rell and Clarence for a couple of reputed assassins and requests that they accompany his sellers on a day run in exchange for Keanu's return.

There are some great comedic bits, some as simple as the adorable kitten (actually portrayed by seven different tabby kittens) who meows with its full body, coming out more as an enthusiastic squeak, and culture clash of Clarence in particular, a corporate counselor for team-building exercises, with the inner-city gang kids they accompany on business.  There are substantial portions, however, during which laughs come in short supply, and the balancing of tones between violent gang warfare and the goofiness of the characters suffers as a result.  While Atencio's work on Key and Peele showcases an impressive versatility, within the feature, he isn't so successful at making those tonal shifts as someone like Edgar Wright.  The comedy style we've seen them work in before derived heavily from the kind of absurdity and genre conventions present in the movie, as well as the hidden intent of polite social conventions and dialogue, such as the now-iconic Luther, Barack Obama's "anger translator", which isn't here so much.  Where the movie works best is perhaps in its leading men, who bring a lot of likable screen charisma and chemistry, and even when they forget to be funny, they have a surprising amount of heart.

Masked Menace Terrorizes City: Sam Raimi's Spider-Man Trilogy

Last year, ahead of the release of AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, I took the opportunity to say my peace on the Marvel Cinematic Universe series up until that point, and I don't have too much new to say about them just now, but I'm still looking forward to CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR.  The new movie will introduce Marvel Studios' brand-new iteration of Marvel Comics' most iconic character, Spider-Man, to now be portrayed by Tom Holland (THE IMPOSSIBLE, IN THE HEART OF THE SEA), the third actor to play the character in a major Hollywood movie in just 14 years.  Ahead of CIVIL WAR's release on May 6, feel free to join me in a look back on the five previous movies to star everyone's favorite webhead, including the good, the bad and the ugly, beginning with Sam Raimi's trilogy starring Tobey Maguire...

SPIDER-MAN
Released 3 May 2002
Directed by Sam Raimi
Starring: Tobey Maguire, Willem Dafoe, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, J.K. Simmons, Cliff Robertson, Rosemary Harris, Joe Manganiello, Ron Perkins, Michael Papajohn
Rated PG-13 for stylized violence and action.
121 minutes
SPIDER-MAN was a long time coming.  Superhero movies were not yet what they are today, and they'd been mostly dominated by DC character-based franchises, which had since burnt out.  Superman rode the wave that brought along Star Wars and Indiana Jones in the late '70s and early '80s, a nostalgia for old-fashioned heroics and pulp entertainment, but due to incremental budget cuts and creative differences behind the scenes, the series ground to an ignominious halt in 1987 with the low-budget flop, SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE.  Then Batman exploded on the scene in 1989, reinvigorating the summer blockbuster, but again, by the fourth installment of the series, the franchise sputtered to a halt with the infamous camp-fest BATMAN & ROBIN in 1998.  2000 brought an interesting twist to the stop-and-start blockbuster genre in the form of X-MEN, a major Marvel Comics property that had a somewhat weirder bent than the more familiar Batman and Superman, made on an upper mid-range budget and a solid hit at the box office, revealing a previously unfulfilled market for superheroes of a new sort.  But Spider-Man was always popular, more popular than the X-Men or any other Marvel character for that matter, but his skill-set was prohibitively expensive and impractical in the pre-digital age.  Even still, attempts to adapt the character for the big screen had been going on since the mid-'80s, and ironically, they first started at low-budget studios who had even less a chance of successfully depicting the character to fans' satisfaction, but hoped to make a quick buck with the benefit of a strong brand name.  Legendary b movie auteur Roger Corman expressed interest, then Cannon Films, the infamous studio that produced SUPERMAN IV, bought the rights, but nothing came of it.  Then in the early '90s, it finally gained some real momentum under James Cameron, the writer and director of TERMINATOR, ALIENS, and then most recently, the hugely expensive and hugely successful special effects extravaganza TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY.  Cameron's Spider-Man is one of the great unmade movies, a weird and completely different beast from what we ultimately got, intended with an R rating, sexual allusions (after gaining his powers which include organic web-shooters in his wrists, as opposed to the mechanical ones he builds in the comics, Peter wakes up in bed covered in white, sticky stuff), and a sex scene atop the Brooklyn Bridge, in a story where the newly-created Spider-Man fights a megalomaniacal Electro and Sandman.  Cameron developed his version at Carolco Pictures, the studio that produced TERMINATOR 2, but in 1996, due to financial excesses and a streak of box office bombs, Carolco declared bankruptcy.  After a few years of litigation cleaning up the Carolco mess and claiming of its resources, the Spider-Man film rights found their way to Sony/Columbia Pictures

Sam Raimi was interesting choice as the director of SPIDER-MAN, a major, mainstream studio franchise film.  A filmmaker with a cult-following, Raimi's body of work is objectively weird, beginning with the ultra-low budget, ultra-gory "video nasty" horror film, THE EVIL DEAD, followed by its increasingly more comedic sequels, EVIL DEAD 2 and ARMY OF DARKNESS.  He had previously wrote and directed an original superhero movie, DARKMAN, as a response to being turned down to direct BATMAN or a movie based on The Shadow, and bears some noteworthy similarities to SPIDER-MAN.  [Coincidentally at the time, a fellow filmmaker with origins in the ultra-gory horror schlock branch of independent filmmaking had been chosen by New Line Cinema to helm a huge franchise, Peter Jackson for Lord of the Rings.]  Raimi's sensibilities are markedly zany and campy, but he had shown a mature restraint on the psychological thriller A SIMPLE PLAN, and his body of work was widely diversified between horror, fantasy, thrillers, a western (THE QUICK AND THE DEAD), and a sports drama (FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME), while maintaining a strong artistic voice.

SPIDER-MAN builds off of Cameron's version, changing the irradiated spider of the comics to an experimental hybrid, trading out the mechanical web-shooters for organic ones, and following an origin story, but the two villains were eventually traded out for a single villain, a different one.  Although not as popularly known as Doctor Octopus, who appeared as a secondary villain in some earlier drafts, the Green Goblin is the most vicious and personal of his classic villains, famously killing Peter Parker's major love interest, Gwen Stacy.  However, the movie, written by JURASSIC PARK screenwriter David Koepp, went with Peter Parker's/Spider-Man's better-known major love interest, Mary Jane Watson, the woman he dated after Gwen's death and eventually married in the comics.
Peter Parker, played by the fitting but unexpected Tobey Maguire, is the scientifically-inclined social outcast from Queens in his senior year of high school and living with his elderly Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson) and Aunt May (Rosemary Harris), who is physically transformed when bitten by an experimental spider hybrid while on a school field trip.  Not only does he no longer need to wear glasses, but he's also ripped, produces super durable webs from his wrists, can stick to walls and ceilings, and possesses supernatural physical prowess.  After attempting to capitalize on his new abilities by entering a cash prize wrestling match (Peter makes a homophobic wisecrack that wouldn't slide today, and the woman at the sign-up desk is a pre-THE HELP Octavia Spencer), the promoter stiffs Peter, who in turn deliberately allows a robber to steal the promoter's money, only to regret it later after the same criminal kills Uncle Ben in a carjacking.  The incident teaches Peter to take his uncle's words to heart, that "With great power comes great responsibility", and he creates the crime-fighting alter ego of Spider-Man.

In parallel, scientist and industrialist Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe), father of Peter's best friend Harry Osborn (James Franco), tests a performance-enhancing formula on himself with disastrous results, giving himself supernatural physical prowess, but driving him balls-out insane, setting the stage for super-powered battle between Norman as the Green Goblin and Peter as Spider-Man.
14 years old now, the visual effects mostly still hold up, largely thanks the relatively minor (well, by today's standards) use of CGI effects.  It helps that the two major players in the major special effects sequences have covered faces and wear colorful, smooth-surfaced costumes that can be more convincingly rendered.  Come to think of it, the better part of the action scenes take place at night (the major exception being Spidey and the Goblin's first fight) with lower lighting that doesn't require quite as much of the visual effects team.  Earlier scenes of Peter testing his new abilities have aged more poorly than most of the movie, particularly wide shots of him leaping across rooftops and when he pursues Uncle Ben's killer in his wrestling outfit.  The CGI doubles didn't look great back then.  They don't move naturally.  There is a moment in which the Goblin vaporizes the OsCorp board members at the World Unity Fair using some variation of his "pumpkin bombs", leaving their clearly digital skeletons to collapse to the ground, and while physical skeletons would look better in the shot, it's just a funny little Raimi bit.

The Goblin is the movie's most volatile element, but his very high presence mostly works thanks to Raimi's already campy sensibilities.  Dafoe was the most well known member of the cast at the time (although Kirsten Dunst had been a noted child actress during the '90s) and was best known for unconventional roles in independent films, having just received acclaim for the meta-horror-comedy SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE, and was sort of akin to the casting of Gene Hackman in SUPERMAN or Jack Nicholson in BATMAN, the high-profile villain.  But if you thought Nicholson was over-the-top as the Joker, Dafoe delivers that times two. The controversial costume is striking for sure, and the mask design (a half-assed attempt from early drafts to provide a practical reasoning for the mask still exists in the tribal masks that decorate Norman's study) is initially really cool, but when combined with acting, I don't think the Power Rangers villain comparisons are too off.  But again, it often plays into Raimi's style, pushed to its limits in the reaction shot of the Goblin taking a wad of webbing to the eyes during their first fight.  The rest of his outfit is established as the flight suit designed to control a weaponized "glider" developed at OsCorp, and with its bent knees, it looks ridiculous.  But Dafoe is up to the task, snarling all of his Goblin lines with exuberant comic book villainy, and his Norman is so smarmy.  And recoiling with, "Oh! That's cold," when strapping into the chemical chamber?  Love it.  Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man is a smart and unconventional choice that seems like it would be very difficult to get away with today.  He's sufficiently dorky, but he's not exactly handsome, something that even a nerd like Peter Parker has to be able to pull off today.  Nah, he's the real geek deal, even when he's in the Spider-Man costume.  There's not that much of a transformation.  Peter Parker still feels awkward as Spider-Man, even if he enjoys the power of playing superhero.  In comparison to the only major Marvel movie predecessor X-MEN, which traded in its super team's colorful blue and yellow spandex for tactical black leather, Spider-Man's costume, designed by James Acheson, holds relatively true to the comics.  To be fair, Spidey's look was already far better known beyond the comics-reading base than that of the X-Men, but this movie also looks to Tim Burton's BATMAN by taking the established look and texturizing it and darkening a bit.  The Batman movies eventually got carried away with the costume details (nipples!), but most other comics characters translated to the screen had stuck with a somewhat bland standard of spandex.  The most striking alteration to the traditional look is Spidey's sunglasses-style reflective eye pieces, which look really cool, but also turned out to be a real boon to the marketing department, which prominently placed the reflection of the World Trade Center Twin Towers in Spidey's eye for the teaser poster that was unveiled in summer of 2001 and promptly recalled in September (while a number of Hollywood productions such as LILO & STITCH and MEN IN BLACK II were altered as a direct response to 9/11, the specter of the attacks looms large over the New York-set SPIDER-MAN in particular, including an unlikely teaser trailer with special footage of Spidey webbing up a helicopter full of bank robbers between the Twin Towers, which was also pulled from theaters in September 2001).
Kirsten Dunst is a popular point of consternation in this series, but in fairness, Mary Jane Watson isn't an especially strong character, at least in this incarnation.  The character is there entirely to be a love interest, the girl next door (Peter stares out of his bedroom window right across into her bedroom window, and everyone seems okay with how creepy this is) who Peter is head-over-heels for from the opening narration.  She's a kind person with a perky personality, but otherwise, there's not much to her.  Perhaps it would be enough to get by for some actresses, but Dunst doesn't go anywhere with it.  She's not 'bad' in the role, she's just kind of perfunctory.  To get superficial for a moment though, she's at her most attractive in this first movie.  Maybe it's the bolder shade of red for her hair, but she looks good here.

While Koepp's script replaces Gwen Stacy from the comics with "M.J.", he maintains and teases a famous event from the comics when the climactic action revolves around the Green Goblin's kidnapping of M.J.  In the 1973 comics arc "The Night Gwen Stacy Died", the Goblin abducted Gwen and took her to the tower of a bridge (referred to in the comic as the George Washington Bridge, but with illustrations resembling the Brooklyn Bridge) to bait Spider-Man, but when Spider-Man realizes she's dead, it's unclear whether she was killed by the Goblin beforehand or by accident in Spidey's attempt to rescue her.  In the movie, the Goblin takes M.J. to the Queensboro Bridge, where he presents Spider-Man with a moral dilemma, whether to save her or to save a tram car full of children.  While I can appreciate the more heroic direction of Spider-Man being able to rescue both by force of will, it seems like the more interesting direction would be to prove his inability to save everyone by truly forcing him to make a choice.  Instead, it turns out to be a tease, with a little bit of post-9/11 corniness (to be fair, by now, we're separated enough to not have that connection so apparent, but when the movie came out in summer 2002, the New Yorker's helping Spider-Man fight back against the Goblin was almost definitely a nod to the post-9/11 New York pride, with the final shot of Spider-Man and the American flag used to similar effect) as Spider-Man manages to save everyone.

The climax continues to play out similarly to the way it did in the comics afterward though, with the fight carrying on into an abandoned building and ending with the Goblin's accidental death by his glider.  The climactic fight is an odd turn in the movie, becoming significantly more vicious than before, while still maintaining the comic book flavor of bodies crashing through brick walls.  In a trend that continues through his other Spider-Man movies, Raimi finds a way to bring out his actor's face by having an explosion blast away fragments of Spider-Man's mask, enough to get a decent range of expression.  Just as Spider-Man gets the upper hand, the Goblin reveals himself to be Norman Osborn and makes the plea that he's been like a father to Peter, an idea that pops up here and there in the movie, but is never as prominent as I think it may have been intended to be in the script stage.  It's a cool idea, to have Peter lose his main father figure in Uncle Ben, and then be fighting another man he looks upon as a father and have to make that decision when he learns the Goblin's true identity, but it doesn't ever congeal.  The decision to turn the Goblin's death into a bit of a comic beat, with a brief shot of a surprised Norman uttering a weak, "Oh," just before being impaled against a wall is very Raimi.

Even though they don't kill M.J., the movie ends on a pretty great beat, sort of down but also affirming when, at the funeral of Norman Osborn (presumably murdered by Spider-Man, still unknown as the secret identity of the Green Goblin to everyone but Peter), M.J. professes her love to Peter.  It's absolutely his greatest dream come true, and he should be euphoric, but Raimi's hero is all about making the right choices, no matter how tough, however great the sacrifice, and Peter shuts her down cold.  Real cold.  It's a baller move, and it wraps up the movie with Peter turning to walk away alone, forced to be the hero even when that means giving up what he wants the most because it's what's right.  Not to leave us sitting on that downer-ish note however, we get one last great swing through the skyscrapers of New York filmed via the cable-suspended "Spydercam".
Bryan Singer's X-MEN deserves a lot of credit for setting fire to the modern wave of superhero movies, proving that even a slightly lower-tier comic book property had the sufficient fan-base to be a box office hit, but I don't think it could have had the sustained impact without SPIDER-MAN.  It was the one-two punch, and frankly, while it might have wound up differently, SPIDER-MAN would have had that impact with or without X-MEN.  It opened to a then unheard of $114.8 million weekend (the current opening weekend record is now STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS's $247.9 million), making it the first movie to ever have a $100+ million weekend and breaking the previous and recently set record of HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE with $90.2 million.  After SPIDER-MAN came Ang Lee's HULK, Tim Story's FANTASTIC FOUR, and Mark Steven Johnson's GHOST RIDER, and they all sucked (some of them sucked in interesting ways, but c'mon, they're not very good), but then came Christopher Nolan's BATMAN BEGINS, a movie that reboots Batman in a clearly post-Raimi's Spider-Man landscape before branching out into something else, and a few years after that, Marvel starts producing their movies independently, starting with IRON MAN.  In that, SPIDER-MAN is identifiable as one of the seismic events in the course of blockbuster movies.

Top 3 of SPIDER-MAN

1. Peter Stiffs M.J.- It's not what you'd expect from this big summer blockbuster, but Peter's denial of M.J. after the funeral is an awesome act of personal sacrifice to close the movie up on, and you get the great moment while Peter walks away and M.J. suddenly makes the connection between the kiss they shared and her iconic "upside-down" makeout with Spider-Man.
2. Final Fight- Things get really rough at the end when the Goblin and Spider-Man duke it out in the abandoned building (I seem to remember the junior novelization calling it an abandoned hospital), and maybe the brutality is a little over the top, but the bodies flying through brick walls is fun, and I like the set with sections of floorboards sitting on stilts.  Tobey Maguire gets a pretty good yelp in there too, when the Goblin lands a hard blow.
3. Cliff Robertson as Uncle Ben- I guess I didn't find a good spot to mention before, but Cliff Robertson is really good as Peter's Uncle Ben Parker.  It's a small but critical role, and he's very likable in that blue collar paragon of moral virtue uncle way.  No, really.

Bottom 3 of SPIDER-MAN

1. "You Mess With One of Us, You Mess With All of Us!"- I get that it was a tribute to the solidarity of New Yorkers in the wake of 9/11, but, well, it's stupid.  "Leave Spidey alone! You're gonna pick on a guy trying to save a bunch of kids?"  Well, duh, New Yorker man!  Did he notice the Goblin was the one trying to kill a bunch of kids?  Raimi gets the New Yorkers supporting Spider-Man bit much better in the sequel.
2. Spidey's First Swing- I'm talking about the scene when he pursues Uncle Ben's carjacker while wearing the wrestling outfit.  The effects feel very rough and unfinished.
3. Interview Montage- After Peter graduates and begins his career as a professional Spider-Man, there's a montage of various New Yorkers giving their opinions as if responding to an unseen questioner with a microphone.  It's not a bad idea as a way to set up his quickly spreading notoriety, but most of the subjects, who seem to be improvising, aren't great.  "I think it's a man. It could be a woman."  Yeah, lady I'm sure that spandex is keeping Spidey's gender a real mystery.

Books of the Jungle

As Disney's THE JUNGLE BOOK arrives in theaters this Friday, let's take a look back at the studio's previous adaptations of Rudyard Kipling's 1894 collection of moral fables set within the jungles of India...

THE JUNGLE BOOK
(ANIMATED-MUSICAL/FAMILY) 
Released 18 October 1967
Directed by Wolfgang Reitherman
Featuring the Voices of: Phil Harris, Sebastian Cabot, Bruce Reitherman, George Sanders, Sterling Holloway, Louis Prima, J. Pat O'Malley, Verna Felton, Clint Howard
Rated G
78 minutes
Marketed as the "last animated film to have Walt Disney's personal touch", THE JUNGLE BOOK was the studio's 19th animated feature film and the last one over which Walt oversaw production before his death on 15 December 1966.  The movie was released 10 months later in October 1967.
It's widely accepted as a classic, but I'm going to offer an unpopular opinion.  It's fine.  It can't touch the greatness of Disney's Golden Age (SNOW WHITE, PINOCCHIO, FANTASIA, DUMBO and BAMBI), nor is it on the level of second-tier Disney classics like PETER PAN, CINDERELLA, ALICE IN WONDERLAND or ONE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIANS.  It's not as beautiful and lavishly crafted as SLEEPING BEAUTY or LADY AND THE TRAMP, but it's a lot livelier, and it's an improvement on the studio's previous feature, THE SWORD IN THE STONE.
With its many anthropomorphized animal characters, THE JUNGLE BOOK is an opportunity for Disney's animators to ply their pencils toward something fun, if not especially adventurous, artistically.  It's a very loose adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's collection of moral fables set within the jungles of India, keeping the focus on Mowgli, as per usual, while eliminating all other human characters from the main narrative.  Even so, the story is episodically structured, as Mowgli (voiced by director Wolfgang Reitherman's son, Bruce), an abandoned "man-cub" encounters various animals with varied interests as the panther Bagheera (voiced by sitcom actor and recurring Disney voice, Sebastian Cabot) tries to deliver the unwilling boy to the Man Village before he runs into the man-hating king of the jungle, the tiger Shere Khan.

The marvelously sardonic George Sanders transposes his famous personality into Shere Khan, making him into one of the more fun, and still sufficiently threatening, Disney villains, digging his claw around in the python Kaa's nostril in the middle of an interrogation.  On the other hand, the dominating personality of the film, for better or worse, is that of radio personality Phil Harris, best known as the band leader from The Jack Benny Program, here voicing Baloo the bear, a character who he would essentially reprise in next two Disney productions (as "Thomas O'Malley" in THE ARISTOCATS and 'Little John" in ROBIN HOOD).  The thing about Harris is that a little of him goes a long way, and there is a lot of him in THE JUNGLE BOOK, resulting his character's likability coming and going in waves.  The standout character of the movie is the wacko King Louie, an orangutan with a professed desire to be human (you know, like Ariel in THE LITTLE MERMAID), who wants Mowgli to give him man's secret to creating fire.  Voiced by "The King of Swing" Louis Prima, a somewhat past his prime jazz musician of Italian heritage, the character of Louie and the other monkeys has sometimes been accused of black racial stereotyping (because everything Disney is "secretly racist!"), and to be fair, it walks a fine line, but ultimately, I think it's more a case of good old-fashioned white appropriation of black culture.  Either way, it's a funny character.
Where the movie really thrives is in its soundtrack, both the musical score by Disney house composer George Bruns, properly ominous and exotic, and the jazzy musical numbers by Richard and Robert Sherman, especially "I Wan'na Be Like You", and Terry Gilkyson's iconic "The Bare Necessities", which are the movie's biggest pick-me-ups.  For all its zesty style, the movie hits a hard bummer note in the third act once Mowgli meets the vultures, initially modeled in part on The Beatles, who were meant to voice the characters before scheduling fell through.  Voiced with Liverpudlian accents anyway, the mop-topped vultures are a series of dumb jokes culminating in the irritating barbershop quartet-style number, "That's What Friends Are For".  Matching the new change in color palette, the movie strikes a note of gray blahs at this point.  When it ends, it ends abruptly, clumsily, though reasonably, putting a cap on the series of episodes.

THE JUNGLE BOOK comes at a point in Disney animation soon after the development of the revolutionary Xerox process, which removed the need for animators' drawings to be inked onto animation cels by hand, but resulted in generally "scratchy" lines during its earlier uses.  Animators preferred the more full preservation of their drawings, as opposed to hand-inked films where only the lines deemed fully necessary were translated by the inker, but for better or worse (and I'm sure plenty of people would argue 'better'), THE JUNGLE BOOK exchanges that pristine quality for something just a little messier.  Sometimes it seems like everyone has fleas though.
The movie has lots of fun animal gags, jazzy tunes and some fairly endearing characters, but it feels more like a kids' movie than the upper-tier Disney animated features.  It's the kind of movie that would be fine to watch with your kids, but there's not much to get out of it on your own as an adult.  It's frothy and a little annoying at times.  Within the timeline of Disney productions, it's unmistakably a product of Walt's latter years when, with exception of Disneyland and EPCOT, his output grew increasingly safe, although pleasant and friendly.  No longer the bold, experimenting folk artist of the studio's peak years, he had become "Uncle Walt", the kind old gentleman who introduced episodes of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, more a brand than a person.  It's a vibrant, mostly peppy studio product, but definitely a studio product, and one with which its endearing qualities only get it so far.

RUDYARD KIPLING'S THE JUNGLE BOOK
(ADVENTURE/FAMILY) 
Released 25 December 1994
Directed by Stephen Sommers
Starring: Jason Scott Lee, Lena Headey, Cary Elwes, John Cleese, Sam Neill, Jason Flemyng, Stephan Kalipha, Ron Donachie, Faran Tahir
Rated PG for action/violence and some mild language.
111 minutes
Before he became known for big-budget, CGI-laden action-adventure B movies like THE MUMMY, VAN HELSING and G.I. JOE: RISE OF COBRA, Stephen Sommers got his start at Disney, where he wrote and directed much lower-budget action-adventure B movies with only a few seconds of computer-generated imagery at most.  The follow-up to his Disney-produced loose adaptation of Mark Twain's THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (decent, but very cheesy and featuring a terrible child performance by Elijah Wood), Sommers' THE JUNGLE BOOK (also known as RUDYARD KIPLING'S THE JUNGLE BOOK, following in the footsteps of the box office hit BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA (1992) and MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN (1994)) is hardly even an adaptation as much as it is a typical Tarzan adventure with a few of Kipling's characters (ones recognizable from the 1967 animated film anyway) playing the parts.  Mowgli is shown to be thought lost in a tiger attack by the fearsome Shere Khan when, as a mere tot, his father (who is killed by the tiger) is leading British Colonel Geoffrey Brydon (Sam Neill) and his little girl, Katherine "Kitty", to his new post.  Sommers' quickly brushes over any of Mowgli's adventures in the jungle however, as the film soon jumps ahead to years later when Mowgli, now a muscular young wild man played by Jason Scott Lee, has a tumultuous reintroduction to civilization, represented in the good by the now grown and blossomed Kitty Brydon (Lena Headey) and Dr. Julius Plumford (John Cleese), who help him to learn English and behave "civilized", and represented in the bad by the oblivious Col. Brydon's sinister protege and suitor of Kitty's, Captain William Boone (Cary Elwes), who wants Mowgli to lead him to the mythical Monkey City in the jungle, said to contain mountains of treasure.

Very much an old-fashioned, Saturday matinee-style B movie, it makes use of matte paintings for exterior shots of the jungle ruins making up Monkey City and occasional other scenery, while, in the early days of prohibtively expensive computer animation (the first instance of photo-realistic computer-animated creatures had only first appeared in JURASSIC PARK the year before), live animals are used, but with a few exceptions, clearly not at the same time as the human actors.  As with Sommers' Mummy movies, THE JUNGLE BOOK is problematic in its treatment of race and colonialism as it follows in the tradition of old adventure movies like GUNGA DIN, and while the American-born Hawaiian-Chinese Jason Scott Lee plays the Indian hero, actual Indian actors are only cast in villainous roles.  The actual importance of these distinctions is debatable, but it gathers added attention in light of the retrograde depiction of colonialism and mystical Indian/Arabic stereotypes (in one scene, as British soldiers pursue Mowgli, a street magician plays a punji to cause a rope to rise out of a pot like a snake charmer, and another street performer is walking on hot embers).

Mostly, it's a movie aware of its B movie stylings, but the "love story" which Sommers' script proclaims the movie to be from right out the gate is weirdly self-aggrandizing, and amounts to very little.  Neither Headey or Lee are bad in their roles, but they are just as lacking in chemistry as Headey is with Elwes' romantic rival.  The acting is all over the map with lots of scenery chewing, but none are as hammy as Elwes (probably best known as "Wesley" from Rob Reiner's THE PRINCESS BRIDE) in the role of Captain Boone, a sadistic, mustache-twirling pompous ass of a British-accented snob.  Neill and Cleese also play into British stereotypes, the former a shouty military man, the latter being Cleese's usual stuffy, bumbling professor-type.  Cleese's Dr. Plumford is the movie's "comedic relief", but nearly all the comedy in the movie is of the light-hearted but laughless and unwitty sort.  Oh, and you can bet your arse that there's a Scotsman with a handlebar moustache and a temper that gets the best of him amongst Boone's crew of treasure hunters.  Headey, well, there's not much to say about Headey.  She's fine, but her character is such a generic "Jane" type that she simply doesn't have a lot of impact.  Lee, who later voiced "David" in the 2002 animated Disney feature LILO & STITCH, is a charming and funny adventure movie lead though.
The movie is rated PG for "action/violence and some mild language", a rating which Roger Ebert called "laughable", which is probably a bit overblown, but as a Disney movie, it is surprisingly violent/scary at times.  There are a few live-action Disney adventure movies from the '90s like that, being rated PG but definitely on the upper end of the rating, leavened slightly by their genre distinctions such as TALL TALE from the same year, where legendary cowboy Pecos Bill shoots off the "trigger fingers" of multiple gunmen, or THE THREE MUSKETEERS from the year before.  When I watched THE JUNGLE BOOK as a kid, I admit, the tiger scenes scared the crap out of me.  Watching them now, it's actually a bit amusing how obvious the staged animal and trainer "attacks" are, but seriously, back then it made me queasy.  The snake was always fun though, a combination of puppetry, a live anaconda, and a bit of very primitive CGI (ironically, the snake in ANACONDA from three years later doesn't look any better), guarding the treasure of Monkey City.  But yeah, it's  on the rough side for a Disney family film, but sometimes very silly with not enough action to satisfy young adult audiences of adventure movies, leaving it a little bit in limbo as to who the proper audience is.
Even still, regardless of their dubious quality, I can't help but enjoy THE JUNGLE BOOK and other PG-rated '90s Disney adventure movies of its ilk, and not for a sense of nostalgia.  I watched them in my childhood, but rarely more than once or twice, and there's not that emotional connection.  There's an outdated sense of innocence, even in the face of violence and peril, and the filmmaking is quaint but energetic.  THE JUNGLE BOOK was pretty old-fashioned when it came out in theaters 22 years ago, and unlike the animated movie, it's almost entirely waned from pop culture memory.  It doesn't deserve to stand as a classic today by any stretch, but it's a fun kind of movie that they rarely make anymore.  It's just a dumb, fun, overly romanticized B movie adventure yarn with nothing substantial to do with its namesake.

Images via Disney