Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle (2018)

Andy Serkis's Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle arrives as a grim, humorless cousin to the Disney musical, a Netflix acquisition that Warner Bros. offloaded after years of delays and cold feet. It adapts Kipling with a straight face and a high body count, trading singalongs for mutilation and colonial trophy hunters. The film is many things: dark, ambitious, occasionally incoherent. It is not, however, a lecture. The sermonizing is kept to a minimum, which is its own small mercy.

The production does make a partial gesture toward representation. Rohan Chand, an Indian-American actor, carries the film as Mowgli, and Freida Pinto appears as Messua. That is a modest step. The voice cast, however, remains a parade of white British thespians, a fact that critics in India rightly noticed. There is also a faint postcolonial pulse. The villain is John Lockwood, a British hunter who collects trophies and shot the tusk off Hathi. The Indian man-cub and the jungle creatures unite against the imperial predator. It is not a treatise. It is a whiff of context.

Elsewhere, the film's social consciousness is close to nonexistent. No LGBTQ characters or themes. No climate crusade. No anti-capitalist anger. No body positivity, despite the albino wolf cub Bhoot. No neurodivergence. No revisionist history, unless we count making Kipling darker. The feminist angle is a shrug: Nisha and Messua are kind, but the film offers no gendered critique. The closing narration about Mowgli giving the animals a voice is a mild moral, nothing more. What we have is a somber adventure that occasionally remembers it is set in colonial India. The rest is just wolves, tigers, and melancholy.