The Jungle Book (1994)

Growing up wild can teach you courage and loyalty, but learning to live among humans may be the greatest challenge of all. Stephen Sommers' "Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book," Disney's second take on Kipling's classic stories, drops the songs and talking animals of its animated musical and instead delivers an old-fashioned adventure closer in spirit to Alexander Korda's lush 1942 version. Jason Scott Lee ("Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story") plays the grown Mowgli, a boy lost in the Indian jungle as a child and raised among wolves, who learns the ways of the wild from Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther. Years later, he's fascinated by Kitty (Lena Headey), the English girl he befriended as a child, when he spots her riding through the jungle, and he follows her to her colonial outpost. As she teaches him about polite society, her greedy, arrogant suitor, a British army captain (Cary Elwes), schemes to use Mowgli to find a fabled lost city filled with treasure. From here, the film leans more toward "Tarzan" than Kipling, as Mowgli races through the jungle, swings on vines and battles the snobbish Englishman, along with his old foe, the tiger Shere Khan. Still, it's a family adventure at heart, with colorful locations, grand sets and plenty of fun moments with the animals. Sam Neill brings his usual moral authority to Kitty's father, a British colonel, and John Cleese adds dry humor as a kindly, absent-minded doctor who teaches Mowgli to speak English.