The new Tarzan film, The Legend of Tarzan, plays as if a dog ate part of the script. It opens with Alexander back in his baronial English manse, where he’s “hybridizing coconuts, ” with no intention of returning to the Belgian Congo. His splendid backstory, meanwhile, is sprinkled through the action in brief, hazy flashbacks, so the whole thing feels like a sequel to a movie that was never made. So damn frustrating!
Why does Clayton go back to Africa? It takes a lot of setup. If I followed it correctly, a tribal chief will hand over a load of diamonds that Belgium needs to finance its burgeoning slave trade in return for Tarzan, who committed some unspecified-until-later offense against him. It’s the job of the Belgian king’s nefarious envoy(Christoph Waltz) to lure Clayton back under false pretenses, and his unwitting accomplice in that task is George Washington Williams(Samuel L. Jackson), who comes to Clayton for help compiling evidence that the king is, indeed, enslaving the indigenous population. Clayton’s wife, Jane(Margot Robbie), insists on coming along because that’s what Jane does. She’s plucky that way.
Director David Yates did a yeoman job with the last few Harry Potter installments and made the fine British mini-series State of Play.(The American movie adaptation was negligible.) But either he has no interest in the African landscape or else the studio pared away the connective tissue, leaving nothing but formula dreck. The Legend of Tarzan feels as if it wants to be longer, to breathe a little and get down. The staging isn’t inept, but individual shots seem truncated, the action pared down to its unoriginal essence. As it stands, the CG apes are impressive, the elephants(I don’t know if they’re CG) magnificent, and a short scene in which a pair of lions nuzzle Clayton absolutely lovely. The humans could have used some help.
No, that’s not fair. Skarsgård could have made an excellent Clayton/Tarzan under different circumstances. He has the right combination of refined features and a rangy body that looks at home in the treetops. I don’t think it’s his fault that he can’t get a rhythm going and ends up looking like a paler Viggo Mortensen. Among the movie’s innumerable disappointments is that it takes an hour for him to remove his shirt(he never takes off his trousers), while Robbie is fully clothed from first to last. Wouldn’t those trousers constrict Tarzan’s vine-swinging? Wouldn’t Jane be more comfortable in a pair of jungle shorts? Sorry to be superficial, but you miss at least half the fun in a Tarzan movie without bare limbs.