Review of The Legend of Tarzan (2016) by Gentm2015 — 24 Aug 2016

The Legend of Tarzan is directed by David Yates and stars the likes of Alexander Skarsgård, Samuel L. Jackson, Margot Robbie, Djimon Hounsou, Jim Broadbent, and Christoph Waltz.

With a director such as the amazing David Yates, you'd except your fantasy movie experience to be special considering his brilliant previous work on the Harry Potter franchise but you'd just be left disappointed - like me.

This movie had it all going for, a big budget, an amazing cast and director all they had to do was come up with a simple script that pushes Tarzan towards his adventure on the jungle, and they failed miserably. The story is so confusing and even worse uninteresting that at a point you're left asking yourself - is Tarzan even on this ?

And when we finally do arrive at the ever so expected Tarzan classic sequences such as, swinging through the jungle, it is so disappointing and terribly done that you realize it was not worth the wait at all. Heck, even the fight scenes with Tarzan in it were so poorly shot, with intense shaky cam that makes it nearly impossible to tell what's going on. Then there are a lot of side stories that are just thrown in there for the sake of the story that you do not care about at all.

On a more positive note though, Samuel L. Jackson looked like he was having fun on the role and his character gave the film that much needed energy from time to time. Christoph Waltz however was generic to an unbelievable degree, his character's motivation for doing the things he's doing make very little sense, not that anybody even cares about it either way. Even the CGI was mediocre, in a year when we've had movies like The Jungle Book where the talking animals looked almost photo-realistic, Legend of Tarzan just fails on that and many other levels too.

There were a few scenes here and there that were fine-ish to look at and slightly interesting but overall I would not recommend this film at all. It is filled with potential but only ends up being a major disappointment that suffers from terrible pacing and a story which is all over the place to say the least.