Mowgli: Legend Of The Jungle Review - 5 Ups & 4 Downs
A flawed yet ambitious potential cult fave.
Andy Serkis' Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle finally releases on Netflix this weekend, and considering it started shooting way back in March 2015, it's certainly had one hell of an arduous journey to audiences.
Severely hamstrung by Disney's 2016 The Jungle Book stealing away most of its thunder - resulting in countless delays and title changes - Warner Bros. ultimately sold Mowgli to Netflix this past summer, and having now witnessed the final product, it sure is easy to see why.
Rest assured that Mowgli is not some disaster dumped on the streaming platform because it's a bad movie. However, it clearly had little commercial viability given both its proximity to the Disney film and some of Serkis' more daring, family-unfriendly creative decisions.
Is Mowgli worth a watch at home, then? Absolutely. It's a bold and interesting re-telling of Rudyard Kipling's classic tales, if also thoroughly messy and imperfect.
Critics have generally been fairly mixed on the film so far, and that feels about right for an envelope-pushing blockbuster which isn't quite as assured as it thinks it is...