Enter The Legend of Tarzan, the first live-action Tarzan film of the modern CGI era, and to say that the filmmakers take advantage of all the digital tools at their disposal would be something of an understatement. For the first time in cinematic history we get to see an apparently flesh-and-blood Tarzan swinging through the trees, dashing along limbs hundreds of feet in the air, and bounding across great expanses with all the speed, agility, and power that Burroughs described in his 24 Tarzan novels. We also get to see him battling it out with apes, leaping onto moving trains, jumping off cliffs, and running through a stampede of wildebeests. In other words, there is no physical endeavor that could be imagined that Tarzan cannot now be realistically depicted doing.

If only that were all there was to making a good Tarzan movie. While The Legend of Tarzan certainly satisfies on a visceral level, bringing Burroughs’s pulp creation into the modern digital fold, director David Yates, coming off his lengthy stint helming the last four entries in the Harry Potter series, overdirects the film to the point that he gives us vertigo long before Tarzan grabs onto a single vine. As if he is terrified that we might be bored for even a second, Yates and his cinematographer Henry Braham (The Golden Compass) keep the camera in constant motion, at one point swinging it in wide arcs around characters who are otherwise having a relatively mundane conversation. It is as Yates didn’t fully trust the script by Adam Cozad (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit) and Craig Brewer (who was originally slated to direct) and felt that any and all deficiencies it might have could be remedied by constant movement. It won’t take much to convert the movie into a theme park ride, which it frequently resembles.

The narrative largely eschews Tarzan’s origin story, beginning instead with Tarzan having fully assumed his position as John Clayton, the heir to the wealthy Greystoke dynasty in England. We do get scattered flashbacks depicting his shipwrecked parents and the treehouse they built in the African jungle being overrun by apes, one of whom adopts Tarzan as her own, as well as bits of Tarzan’s childhood and his eventually meeting Jane Porter (Margot Robbie), who was also raised in Africa by educators and is now his wife. Assuming the audience is largely familiar with Tarzan’s background, the film launches immediately into the plot, which involves the King of Belgium’s attempts to enrich his country with diamonds from the Congo and enslaving all the region’s native inhabitants.

Tarzan is drawn back to Africa by a ruse cooked up by Leon Rom (Christoph Waltz), the Belgian king’s righthand man, a ruthless mercenary cloaked in the always suspicious white linen suit of the nasty colonialist. Waltz plays the character as little more than a riff on the refined sadism that first netted him an Oscar in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basters (2009); his performance works, but it feels phoned in at the same time because it is precisely what everyone would expect him to do. Rom collaborates with Chief Mbonga (Djimon Hounsou), who wants Tarzan dead for very personal reasons, but doesn’t realize that, by working with the Belgians, he is dooming his own people to slavery. Tarzan is joined by both Jane, who insists on coming along to Africa (“I was born there too, you know,” she snaps at one point), and George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson), an American emissary who is investigating the newly entrenched slave trade in Africa. In a film that is already rife with anachronisms (it is supposedly set in the mid-1880s, but dialogue and character attitudes are right out of the 21st century), Jackson feels particularly misplaced, especially when delivering lines like, “We’re screwed.”

Despite her very modern attitudes and ability to survive in the jungle, Jane winds up playing the damsel in distress for most of the film, chained to the railing of Rom’s steamboat as it chugs up a wide African river, released only for an awkward dinner date in Rom’s cabin. The film’s politics are naturally quite advanced from the ones in Burroughs’ novels, which took for granted the superiority of Tarzan, a product of the European gentry after all, over the dark continent. Here, Tarzan is much more egalitarian, working should-to-shoulder with a number of the Congolese, who appear to be his equal in terms of physical ability, in his efforts to stop the slave trade.

As Tarzan, Skarsgård (True Blood) is certainly handsome and intense, his much touted four months of physical training having paid off in rippling muscle. However, the manner in which he plays Tarzan is too remote, such that it is nearly impossible to feel much for him (especially with scene chewers like Waltz and Jackson on hand in virtually every scene, Skarsgård feels even more like wallpaper). The film is meant to evoke the internal struggle Tarzan feels between his newly embraced role in English society and the animal he was raised to be, something that is only barely glimpsed in the finished product; Hugh Hudson’s Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), to date the best film adaptation of Burroughs’ work, did a much better job, as Christopher Lambert was able to fully convey both screeching animal and the possibility of containing that animalism once he returns to Greystoke Manor. Yates doesn’t help things by trying to amplify Tarzan in various unhelpful ways, such as depicting him as a Bruce Lee-like master of taking out a dozen men at once when he confronts an entire train car filled with slave-carting soldiers. His righteous fury is plenty righteous, but the scene smacks of overkill, which is all too often the film’s defining characteristic.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © Warner Bros.