Stunning production design, smart pacing, and a well-handled romantic angle make for a seamless, if undemanding, entertainment.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
A full-throttled, technically superb adventure — with more bite than most Disney live-action fare — that offers some winning moments but, ultimately, isn’t as involving as it needs to be.
Chicago Tribune by Gene Siskel
This is nothing more than a half-hour Ramar of the Jungle episode, blown up to motion-picture length.
So so adaptation of the Kipling story. The human performances are riotous but their animal counterparts are blank canvases yet to be coloured.
A routine action drama, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book contains qualities of both forgettability and painlessness.
The Seattle Times by John Hartl
Sommers is so busy spinning his camera, crowding the soundtrack with animal noises and piling on the cheesy visual effects that he can't stop for a reflective moment or a character-revealing touch.
Baltimore Sun by Stephen Hunter
Beautifully mounted and shot, Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book still feels somewhat callow. Its title aside, it never really deals with the issues that the great Kipling raised continually in his distinguished body of work.