A talky and mostly turgid attempt by British director David Yates to build on the epic vision he brought to the final four Harry Potter movies via another beloved literary hero, “The Legend of Tarzan” is sequel, origin story, and racially sensitive revisionist history lesson all in one. What it isn’t is much fun for anyone who’s seen Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ape man in any of his previous incarnations. While name recognition alone should snare a fair number of those who prefer their pulp heroes endowed with superpowers, between this and last year’s “Pan, ” evidence suggests Warner Bros. ought to leave the live-action reboots to Disney.
For a film the scale of Yates’ “The Legend of Tarzan, ” the visual effects are astonishingly subpar, obliging the creative team to distract us with such impressive topographical sights as the African savannah and Alexander Skarsgård’s abs. The latter selling point doesn’t appear until nearly midway through the movie, until which point Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer’s script is concerned primarily with getting Tarzan back to Africa — a prospect his beloved Jane(a semi-empowered Margot Robbie) far prefers to days spent “hybridizing coconuts and playing ping pong.”
While choppy, action-oriented flashbacks retrace the feral child’s formative years in the wild, it seems the one-time vine-swinger has grown up and re-gentrified in rainy old England, where he has traded his loincloth for a dapper pair of pants and assumed his identity as John Clayton III, fifth earl of Greystoke and member of the House of Lords.