With quintessential Quentin collaborators, Christoph Waltz and Samuel L. Jackson, in the cast, I couldn’t help quiz whether THE LEGEND OF TARZAN could have been a terrific Tarantino film.
Waltz, along with Stuart Craig’s production design and Ruth Myers cossies, are the best things in this production, a misjudged mish mash mess of noble savage and white messiah mythology.
Director David Yates who has been at the helm of the last few Harry Potter pictures fails to bring any panache to the preposterous idea behind Edgar Rice Burrough’s Ape man creation.
Alexander Skarsgard is adequate as the vine swinging hominid reared by ponginae, a Lord of the Jungle who also has peerage in green and leafy England. And Margot Robbie is a ludicrously pretty Jane.
Trouble with this picture is that the animals that Tarzan is master of are all CGI and obviously so, as fake as the jungle environs the action takes place in.
The gorillas look like cast off rejects from Planet of the Apes, the big cats are mere feline facsimiles, and the elephants look like Play-dough pachyderms.
The script by Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer is a cherry picked patchwork from Rice Burrough’s original story and subsequent sequels, with blood feuds between man and beast, white and black, and the power play of colonial empire on indigenous peoples, flora and fauna.
Waltz’s villain, Leon Rom, King Leopold of Belgium’s envoy to the Congo, is marvelous, a charming malevolence who wields rosary beads as a garotte.
A couple of scenes between him and Robbie, one regarding his past relationship with a priest, the other a literal “baiting” banter, infuriatingly show a psychological depth that is never fulfilled.
Waltz is given the funniest line in the picture, too, a response to Tarzan’s battle cry.
Since 1918, Tarzan has been a staple of the cinema, possibly reaching its zenith in the Johnny Weissmuller sextet that strode the decade 1932-42. (although Johnny went on to make a further six films as the loin cloth made of lion swinger, the first six also featured the constant Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane).
The last intelligent crack at it was Greystoke, over thirty years ago. This tepid, tricksy, insipid version may put another thirty year moratorium on another movie version.
