The Legend Of Tarzan (12A)

David Yates

IT'S never been easy to make a convincing hero of Tarzan. For one thing, he’s dressed in a loin cloth: if an actor isn’t buff enough, he has nowhere to hide; if he’s too spectacular, it’s distracting. He shares his ability to talk to animals with Dr Doolittle, which makes that skill difficult to take seriously. And the catchphrase that sticks to him like a jungle tick, “Me Jane, you Tarzan”, is the stuff of spoof.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s famed character posed a challenge that hasn’t been met well since Olympic swimmer turned actor Johnny Weissmuller in the 1930s and 1940s. Since then, it’s been mostly forgettable. Tarzan: The Legend Of Greystoke, Lord Of The Apes is best summed up by its pompous title. But that was far superior to Tarzan The Ape Man, in which the supposed lead was a bland hunk merely keeping the screen warm for his Jane, Bo Derek.

Dozens of films, all caught dangling in the vines. But director David Yates did a good job of the Harry Potters. And aren’t we a little tired of heroes in irredeemably silly costumes? Perhaps it’s time to return to one who wears next to nothing.

Yates and his scriptwriters have been smart in re-presenting their hero. This isn’t the “origins” story we might have expected, but one that knits Tarzan’s beginnings – raised by apes after the death of his marooned parents – with a story that sees him as Lord Greystoke, returning to Africa eight years after he’d left. And that story is a punchy, historically feasible one centred on the Congo of the 1880s, whose indigenous people were persecuted and enslaved by Leopold of Belgium, who sacked the country under the guise of philanthropy.

The villain of the piece is Leopold’s man Leon Rom, played by today’s go-to actor for smiling villainy, Christoph Waltz. Rom needs diamonds to pay his mercenaries; tribal leader Mbonga (Djimon Hounsou) has a stack of them, and a grudge against Tarzan; Rom lures the Lord back to Africa with the idea of an exchange.

The film gears up well, with sumptuous scene-setting in Africa before switching to Victorian London, where we find Tarzan (Alexander Skarsgård) as a brooding celebrity keen to be forgotten as the ape-man and taken seriously as an English lord. Wary of accepting an invitation to view Leopold’s supposed good deeds, he’s persuaded by his wife Jane (Margot Robbie) who’s keen to see her African friends. They’re accompanied by an American (Samuel L Jackson), fresh from fighting against slavery in the American Civil War, who smells a rat in the Congo.

The scenes in which Tarzan and Jane reacquaint themselves with the land, their friends and jungle animals (there should be a warning not to try lion-nuzzling when next on safari) are very appealing, while creating a slow-burn sense of anticipation.

Unfortunately, once Rom reveals his hand, it quickly goes to pot, the good work of the script unravelling in a rush from one increasingly daft action sequence to another. The film’s eventual silliness is typified by Jackson, whether reading an American riot act to tribesmen who simply wouldn’t understand him, or over-emoting in a way that only works with Tarantino.

Skarsgård makes a decent, smouldering Tarzan (sensibly eschewing the loin cloth for trousers), Robbie a feisty Jane, Waltz less loquacious than usual but still dastardly and fun. The CGI animals are just OK, but the African landscapes gorgeous. It’s a shame that clumsiness prevents this from being a better movie, and us from reconsidering a much-maligned hero.

The Legend of Tarzan opens in cinemas on Wednesday

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