The Legend of Tarzan (12A)

two stars

Dir: David Yates

With: Alexander Skarsgard, Christoph Waltz, Samuel L Jackson

Runtime: 110 minutes

SWINGING from the pages of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels, Tarzan is one of the great characters of cinema, as easily identifiable, in sight and sound, as Dorothy, Kong, and Mickey Mouse. So it is somewhat fitting that it is David Yates, who once had charge of another cinema giant in the form of Harry Potter, who takes on this latest adaptation of the Tarzan tale.

Yates duly delivers all the components of a Tarzan movie – the old swinger himself, the apes, the vines, yes, even the call of the wild – but good luck finding them amid messy storytelling, a thicket of special effects, and some odd notions of what a Tarzan story should be.

There is a sense from the off that Yates is taking a gamble that will likely not pay off. Instead of starting at the beginning – always the best bit of the Tarzan legend – Yates opens with a quick introduction to the colonisation of Africa in the 19th century. Just what younger viewers have come to see. Lions, elephants, apes? You’ll have to wait for them; we’ve got a lot of character establishment to get through.

King Leopold of Belgium is up to his oxters in debt. There are diamonds in the Congo so the monarch sends an envoy, Leon Rom (Christoph Waltz in familiar, villainous mode) to get them. The chief he negotiates with has a price: bring him Tarzan.

Tarzan, however, is back in Blighty, having put the whole jungle thing behind him. Or so he thinks. Cue a little bit of persuasion from an American envoy in the form of Samuel L Jackson and before you can say “Aaaaaaa-ah-ah-aaaah-ah”, Tarzan, and Jane (Margot Robbie) are on a boat to Africa to right wrongs.

After what seems an eternity, Yates brings on the animals, and an impressive bunch they are, too. Not quite Jungle Book standard, but they should satisfy younger cinemagoers for a while.

As for the rest of the picture, it is badly in need of a wave of Potter’s wand to make it coherent. The story jumps all over the place, flashing back and forth from Tarzan’s origins. Yates does not seem to know what tale he wants to tell. Is it a chase film, an old fashioned B-movie, a romance, a buddy picture? So he throws the lot into the mix and leaves the viewer to make sense of it as best they can.

Alexander Skarsgard looks the part of Tarzan, if you assume Tarzan had access to a gym all the while he was in the jungle. Samuel L Jackson, like Waltz, is on familiar form as a gun-toting, vaguely exasperated sort, while Margot Robbie is not given too much to do other that look longingly into the distance waiting for her man. He Tarzan, she Jane, and this is a dud.