SPOILERS DOWN THE PATH; THE DISCUSSION BELOW WILL NOT BE COMPREHENSIVE WITHOUT IT.
TREAD CAREFULLY. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.
Neel Sethi is a cute boy, but the young man looked too clean to be convincible as the jungle-dwelling man cub. Acting wise, the boy's simply uttering taught dialogues without much actual performance.
Justin Mark's screenplay is staggering! Sense of adventure is totally absent in this Jungle Book as Mowgli's exploitations & explorations are banal! How could Kaa (Scarlett Johansson) have even the slightest possible idea about Mowgli's past? Isn't this the dumbest & laziest way for the script to tell the boy & moviegoers of the former's origins? If these aren't bad enough, the film has all the clichés one could think of to budge the story till its finish line.
By far, the most rewarding aspect of this movie is the voice actors. Bill Murray as Baloo & Idris Elba as Shere Khan are terrific! Christopher Walken as King Louie is bang-up with his modulations & song! Of course, one wouldn't be keen to root for a character like Mowgli who needs to be rescued at every turn, but the least the script could have done was to do justice for the relationship between him & Baloo.
When you have majestic visuals to be harnessed for easy & captivating storytelling, why would you instead, insert a distracting audio narration at the background to turn off the audiences? The computer graphics are excellently naturalistic, while the film editing is sloppy with fade-outs here & there.
If one is to point out the few exciting sequences in this stale picture, those would be Mowgli's first escape from Shere Khan & skedaddle from King Louie. After all the hyped-up flee plan at the climax, everything shatters to nothing. But, the monkeys teaming up to clear the fallen temple bricks & end credits miniature musical are fabulous.