The Legend of Tarzan (2016)

Watched 1/24/24 (HBOMax)

Confounding. David Yates makes an absolute haul of money for WB with the Harry Potter films, garnering critical approval to boot, and with his carte blanche, decides, of all things, to pursue a live-action Tarzan reboot with an awful script that he had no hand in whatsoever. Am I to believe that this director actually sought out this script?

If you said yes, I wouldn’t be surprised. In my humble opinion, Yates’ direction in this is that of a no-talent clown, emphasized further by this coming out the same year as Favreau’s The Jungle Book. His direction is somehow on-par if not worse than the quality of the amorphous blob of a script. The Legend of Tarzan is from its start such a boring, banal affair that you can’t help but wonder if Yates is a real person or an AI entity. 

Favreau’s Jungle Book didn’t just revolutionize certain special effects, but managed to ground a far more absurd story and plot devices through its direction in particulae. Not a perfect script by any means but a lot better than this and Favreau enhanced it to great effect with everything surrounding that script. Tarzan, on the other hand, completely bungles its special effects and green screens while failing uniformly across the board in action, character, and especially dialogue. The PG-13 quick-cut CG action in this is nearly unbearable. I wanted to stop watching during the action scenes but quickly realized you don’t actually get to watch them even if you are watching. That is to say, they are so poorly shot and animated that you really cannot tell what’s happening. Especially when the fan-film CG animals are on screen. Looks like a really bad videogame.

Honestly surprised Skarsgård had a career after this. He is so unbelievably dull and lame in this and the movie forces such a wealth of boring contrivances onto his character that you just don’t want to watch the trainwreck after a while. He’s ripped but somehow looks ridiculously dumb in every scene he has his shirt off, clearly standing in front of a green screen awkwardly in weird pants. His aforementioned fight scenes are painfully janky and horribly staged against the backdrop of the ugly CG jungles. There is nothing cool about him or anyone else in this. It’s so weird to think about how awesome Alex was in Succession and even Northman which this character shares quite a bit of DNA with, actually. But in this one you’re just left wondering, “How did anyone read this script and agree to be in this?” The paychecks must have been something special which… I get it. I, too, am passionate about trying to make a living.

Sam Jackson is there for the most corny quips ever, Christoph Waltz is doing his annoying, discount, post-Basterds-Landa-but-slightly-different thing (the guy has one pitch and I am sick of it), Margot is…wait, why is she in this? And the director is always doing annoying things with the camera to intensify the shit. He will stack Michael Bay spin shots to maddening effect during something as boring as characters delivering pointless exposition (tensionless! pointless! only move the camera when characters move) and consistently flip to the worst angle every time a punch is thrown. It’s tough to decide what’s worst in this. It truly is.

It’s a complete mystery to me why and how this got made. No actual location work, zero lines of dialogue that couldn’t have been written by a toddler, the world’s ugliest color palette, and stars that are certainly not in star parts. I’m glad I watched this with friends (or am I?) or I never would have gotten past the 15-minute mark.

1/10