THE JUNGLE BOOK: Bearly Coherent

Director: Jon Favreau
Writer: Justin Marks
Cast: Neel Sethi, Ben Kingsley, Bill Murray, Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong'o, Christopher Walken, Giancarlo Esposito, Scarlett Johansson
Runtime: 106 mins.
2016

The Jungle Book amounts to a mediocre but entertaining film. It's so entertaining, in fact, that it successfully distracts its audience from its own flaccid plot. The film exists first and foremost as a piece of spectacle, and within that realm it accomplishes exactly what it set out to do. What you've probably heard concerning the visuals is true; they move beyond impressive and into immersive. From the very first moment it's as if you've stumbled into the jungle and are hanging out right alongside Mowgli (Neel Sethi). Not for a moment did the seams show enough to divorce me from Favreau's lush jungle environment, which is shocking when you learn that the entirety of the movie was filmed in an LA soundstage. This is so vividly a living, breathing world. Spending a couple of hours there is a blast.

The impulse to focus on the setting produces some iconic work, but the screenplay is barely enough to prop it up. The result is a tonal mishmash that is trying so hard to please everybody that it fails to achieve a distinct identity of its own. I counted three warring movies existing within Favreau's Jungle Book, any one of which would have been excellent on its own. Three movies that sapped strength from each other, and interrupted each other at inopportune moments. Here is my window into The Jungle Books that could have been.

IRON MAN: Ground Zero Hero

In the weeks leading up to Marvel's next blockbuster juggernaut, Captain America: Civil War, we will be looking at every cinematic iteration of those two warring rapscallions, Captain America and Iron Man.

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Director: Jon Favreau
Writers: Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway
Cast: Robert Downey, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges, Terrence Howard, Clark Gregg, Paul Bettany, Jon Favreau
Runtime: 126 mins.
2008

Eight years later and the success of Iron Man feels inevitable. This is the movie that spawned a franchise of thirteen films and counting. Returning to the source is a fairly satisfying experience. The zippy pace, tight action, and whirlwind of a lead performance make for both an enjoyable standalone experience and a solid foundation for all the hubbub to come. And yet, nobody saw any of this coming.

Iron Man had been in development hell since 1990, burning through directors, writers, and producers on a regular basis. Everyone from Tom Cruise to Nic Cage to Tarantino had been approached about the project. Eventually 2006 rolled around and Marvel Studios took over the mantle. They essentially started from scratch, ignoring the script treatments that had come before. Iron Man was fast-tracked simply because he was their final major property to have never gotten a big screen treatment before. Iron Man was not at all a hot commodity before this film. He was a B-list hero with so little cultural relevance that Marvel had to actively educate potential audiences that Iron Man was a man in a suit rather than some sort of automaton. It's not surprising that the self-financed and unproven Marvel Studios had to go through 30+ writers in order to put together a team for this movie.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: Cap-turing Character

In the weeks leading up to Marvel's next blockbuster juggernaut, Captain America: Civil War, we will be looking at every cinematic iteration of those two warring rapscallions, Captain America and Iron Man.

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Director: Albert Pyun
Writers: Stephen Tolkin, Lawrence Block
Cast: Matt Salinger, Kim Gillingham, Ronny Cox, Ned Beatty, Scott Paulin
Runtime: 97 mins.
1990

The 1990 American-Yugoslavian direct-to-video action film Captain America is the first cinematic adaptation of the character with some semblance of attention paid to the actual character. The first act plays out like a truncated version of Captain America: The First Avenger, with Cap being selected for the Super Soldier Serum, then squaring off against the Red Skull. Cap gets strapped to a rocket that he steers away from the White House and into, if I'm not mistaken, Alaska. After being frozen for about fifty years, Steve Rogers (Matt Salinger) breaks free from the ice and traipses from Alaska down through northern Canada in an attempt to find his way home. At first he does not accept that he is fifty years in the future, but this is a thematic and plot thread that predictably goes nowhere. Instead of exploring his man-outside-of-time psychology, Rogers teams up with his old girlfriend's daughter (a bit gross) and goes after the Red Skull, who is still alive and has recently kidnapped the President (Ronny Cox) because he doesn't like the President's environmental bill. Also, the Red Skull has had face reconstruction surgery since the forties so he no longer has a red skull, just an ugly face.

Captain America may engage with the iconography on the surface level, but as you can probably tell by that recap, the film isn't terribly interested in exploring why the character resonates. It probably would have been better served as a cheesy period piece, but the narrative break between WWII and present day is jarring and disappointing, especially since most of the rest of the movie involves Captain America trekking across the Canadian wilderness in his goofy suit, or sitting around in suburbia acting awfully calm for somebody who has just time traveled fifty years into the future.

The fact that the Red Skull is still around fifty years later, but has waited until now for his most dastardly plot, is also distressing from a storytelling perspective. Plus, taking away his iconic look feels like a cop out at best.

CAPTAIN AMERICA II: DEATH TOO SOON - Camp Cap

In the weeks leading up to Marvel's next blockbuster juggernaut, Captain America: Civil War, we will be looking at every cinematic iteration of those two warring rapscallions, Captain America and Iron Man.

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Director: Ivan Nagy
Writers: Wilton Schiller, Patricia Payne
Cast: Reb Brown, Connie Sellecca, Len Birman, Christopher Lee
Runtime: 83 mins.
1979

Captain America II: Death Too Soon is the 1979 sequel to the 1979 TV movie Captain America, and it is several orders of magnitude better than its predecessor. If you're in the market to watch one of these movies for camp purposes, it should undoubtedly be this one. It's not like you'll be missing anything important from the original's pointless wheel-spinning narrative.

In fact, the plot is a fair bit clearer and more straightforward. A mysterious terrorist who goes by the name General Miguel (Christopher Lee) plans to hold the entire town of Portland hostage by dropping an aging serum on their heads. Miguel is in hiding, pretending to be a prison warden at a local penitentiary. Steve Rogers (Reb Brown) must investigate a small town where something suspicious is going on, so that he might ultimately discover Miguel's location and let Captain America take care of business. Meanwhile, in an irrelevant B-plot, our favorite scientists Dr. Simon Mills (Len Birman) and Dr. Wendy Day (conspicuously replaced by Connie Sellecca--didn't this character used to be blonde??) are working on a cure for the virus. They deliver exposition ably, but fail at everything else.

The film still takes a little too long to reveal what is going on in the town, but the plot is for the most part less obtuse. This is very much to the film's advantage, because the last thing this movie should want is for us to start using our brains to figure out what is happening. Everything about the story is ridiculous, of course, but it's well within the reasonable bounds of schlock sci-fi. Steve Rogers taking time to woo a single mother and hang out at her farm with her kid is a less forgivable narrative misstep.

That being said, you can shrug that stuff off with a laugh because, unlike Captain America, Captain America II doesn't spend an ungodly amount of time on every single sequence. It sets up what it needs to, knocks it down, and awkwardly edits into the next scene. Parts of it still drag, but at least we're not watching a doofus go off motorcycle jumps for five to ten minutes at a time.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: Cap-ital Punishment

In the weeks leading up to Marvel's next blockbuster juggernaut, Captain America: Civil War, we will be looking at every cinematic iteration of those two warring rapscallions, Captain America and Iron Man.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Rod Holcomb
Writers: Don Ingalls, Chester Krumholz
Cast: Reb Brown, Len Birman, Heather Menzies-Urich, Robin Mattson, Joseph Ruskin
Runtime: 97 mins.
1979

The 1979 TV Movie Captain America has a simple premise: What if Captain America's son were a selfish, imbecilic slacker? And what if we made a movie about him?

Of course, the film doesn't seem altogether aware of its own premise, as we are apparently supposed to find this man impressive and heroic. He is not. Let me lay it out for you.

Steve Rogers (Reb Brown) is a hunky behemoth who has just returned from active military service. Now that he's out, his goal in life is to drive around in his van and be lazy for the foreseeable future. He also draws. These are his sole character traits.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: Cap Gun

In the weeks leading up to Marvel's next blockbuster juggernaut, Captain America: Civil War, we will be looking at every cinematic iteration of those two warring rapscallions, Captain America and Iron Man.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Directors: Elmer Clifton, John English
Writers: Royal K. Cole, Ronald Davidson, Basil Dickey, Jesse Duffy, Harry L. Fraser, Grant Nelson, Joseph F. Poland
Cast: Dick Purcell, Lorna Gray, Lionel Atwill
Runtime: 244 mins. (25 min. premier and fourteen 15 min. episodes)
1944

The first and most perplexing thing to note about the 1944 Captain America serial is that it has absolutely nothing to do with Captain America. When I learned about the serial's existence, I was fully anticipating a propaganda-heavy war story, especially considering the time in which it was made and released. Instead, we get the story of Grant Gardner, a District Attorney who occasionally dresses up in a red white and blue costume to fight bad guys. Sometimes he doesn't dress up though, and it's just Grant Gardner fighting them. Also, Captain America doesn't have a shield and just wastes people with his pistol. Seriously, Gardner and Captain America rack up quite an impressive body count over the course of this serial, a fact that none of the authorities seem at all concerned about.

To top it all off, Captain America doesn't seem to have any powers, and, hilariously, he just drives around in a regular car. Unsurprisingly, Timely Comics (to become Marvel Comics in the 1960s) was unhappy with Republic's blatant gutting of their character, but Republic's response was basically, "None of that stuff was in the sample pages you sent us, plus we're in production already." Film historians think Republic just pasted the Captain America likeness over a pre-existing project they had in the pipe. Thus Captain America's first onscreen appearance is aggressively non-canonical.

That doesn't make it bad, though. The serial follows Captain America's pursuit of mysterious criminal The Scarab over a 25-minute premier and fourteen 15-minute episodes. In classic cliffhanger serial fashion, each episode ends with Cap in grave danger, to be resolved in the next chapter. These serials are considered to be cinema, but structurally they're really more like proto-television.