You won't be in my heart.
Edgar Rice Burroughs' Lord of the Apes swings back onto the big screen in The Legend of Tarzan, an out-of-touch adventure epic that's also a misguided foray into historical fiction. It's not as ridiculous a misfire as its trailers suggested, but The Legend of Tarzan's biggest saving grace of not being as bad you expected isn't saying much for a film directed by acclaimed Harry Potter filmmaker David Yates.
The film's plot is basically just a few set-pieces with origin/backstory flashbacks interspersed detailing how the orphaned baby aristocrat John Clayton (played as an adult by Alexander Skarsgard) was found and raised by African apes after his shipwrecked parents died. The movie starts in 1890, years after John has been found and reassimilated into English aristocracy as the Earl of Greystoke. John and his wife Jane (Margot Robbie) now live in England and have not been back to Africa in almost a decade. Their adventures together there years ago are now the stuff of dime novels. Yes, "Tarzan" is a celebrity, a blue-blooded novelty and the stuff of, well, legend. But political machinations in the Congo draw John back there ... and into becoming Tarzan once again.
This is where The Legend of Tarzan delves into the realm of historical fiction as its main plot line is set against the backdrop of the very real, very horrifying Belgian genocide in the Congo. Two real historical figures -- George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson) and Léon Rom (Christoph Waltz) -- are major characters here. Williams is an African-American veteran of America's Civil War who the US sends to King Leopold II's Congo Free State to investigate reports of slavery there. He accompanies Lord Clayton, who is invited as a British trade delegate. They then walk into an elaborate trap set by Belgian officer and murderous racist Captain Rom.
The Belgians are spending a fortune on their rubber operations there and so they seek a legendary cache of diamonds in the tribal territory of Chief Mbonga (Djimon Hounsou) to replenish their coffers. Mbonga agrees to let the Belgians have the diamonds in exchange for them coaxing his old nemesis Tarzan back home so he can finally kill him. It's actually a far more convoluted scheme than that -- also involving British mercenaries and payment deadlines -- but that's the gist.
This elaborate scheme is the framework on which a very thin plot rests. John gets the call home, returns, Jane is kidnapped, he chases after her, a big action finale, the end. That's really it. Peppered in-between this boom-boom-boom series of events are John and Jane's flashbacks to how they met in their youth. Jane, an American whose father taught English to African villagers, considers herself African and is fluent in the local dialect and customs. This particular tribe loves Tarzan and Jane and treat them like family. We know this because they spend every scene with them smiling and hugging and overall just marveling at how lovely these two beautiful white folks are.
The issue of race and the "great white savior" of it all is inescapable here, an antiquated and offensive trope that begs the question of why modern audiences would want to see let alone embrace a film that traffics in it. The Legend of Tarzan dances around it all as delicately as it can, depicting Tarzan and Jane as seeing themselves as native to Africa as the locals, but at the end of the day it's still about a legendary white man out to save black people (and from white colonialism, no less). The Belgian-led holocaust in the Congo is essentially reduced to a backdrop in a live-action cartoon. The African characters aren't entirely without agency here, but this is Tarzan's show so guess who ends up the hero.
You can't help but leave the film suspecting the screenwriters really wanted to just tell a straightforward story about the Belgian atrocities in the Congo and the only way they could get that film made was by sticking Tarzan in it.
Director David Yates was smart to simply keep John/Tarzan a man of few words and let Skarsgard's physicality do the talking if you will. (The film cleverly makes Tarzan's hands and knuckles overdeveloped due to him growing up walking on all fours like an ape.) Robbie is miscast as Jane, proving a distracting, contemporary-feeling presence in a period piece. Jackson and Waltz both phone it in here. Waltz offers up his latest slimy, mumbling, Euro-creep villain, while Jackson's dialogue is at times anachronistic and too buddy movie-ish when he interacts with Tarzan.
Tarzan's near-psychic bond with animals is depicted here, but the movie also shows that while he can clear a train car full of mercs with relative ease he is still only human and can indeed get his ass handed to him in a brawl with an angry ape. Speaking of the apes, the visual effects for them are terrible, given the stellar VFX seen in the rebooted Planet of the Apes films and Peter Jackson's King Kong. The 1984 film Greystoke, a far better Tarzan movie than this in every regard, put men in ape suits and those still hold up better than the 21st century CGI employed here.
The Verdict
Laden with a significant amount of historical and racial baggage, The Legend of Tarzan proves a dopey adventure film with unremarkable performances and some lousy VFX.
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