The Legend of Tarzan (Rated T)
Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Margot Robbie, Christoph Waltz, Samuel L. Jackson
Genre: Action Adventure
Dwight’s Rating: Don’t you just love GEICO commercials?
For at least two decades now, the television advertisements for the Government Employees Insurance Company out of the U.S. have been hilarious, satirical treats, and some of the most entertaining nuggets on the small screen.
The company is notable for running multiple campaigns concurrently, including the long-running GEICO Gecko, the Cavemen, the “Did You Know” series, as well as various spoofs of TV shows and movies.
Recently, some of their cleverest ads fall into their “It’s what you do” series. My favorite sees a spy of the James Bond/Jason Bourne ilk, besieged by countless “bad guys”. Suddenly, his cellphone rings; it’s his mom, with her banal dilemmas, complaining about his father, who’s apparently about to go to war with some squirrels who are “back in the attic” of their home. While mom prattles on, we see behind her a couple of squirrels inexplicably chasing each other around the family pool. The zaniness of it all is pure comic genius!
Then there’s the one with Tarzan and Jane in the jungle. Tarzan barely speaks, but is able to proclaim that he is “King of Jungle”, in his broken English. Jane, meanwhile, is a real nag, incessantly running her mouth, asking animals for directions, while Tarzan insists he knows where he’s going. They constantly bicker while swinging on branches from tree to tree. The announcer chimes in, “If you’re a couple, you fight over directions — it’s what you do!”
It says quite a lot when a 30-second commercial with Tarzan and Jane is infinitely more entertaining, and more effectively and efficiently plotted than a big-budget theatrical production featuring those same characters.
Yes, you read that right — the GEICO commercial with Tarzan and Jane is far better than the nonsense that premiered in theaters last week in the form of “The Legend of Tarzan”!
Nearly every aspect of the film, from the plot to character development, is fatally flawed, from beginning to its completely ludicrous ending.
In the movie, we learn it’s been nearly a decade since Tarzan (Alexander Skarsgård), also known as John Clayton III, left Africa to live in Victorian England with his wife Jane. Danger lurks on the horizon as Leon Rom (Christoph Waltz) — a treacherous envoy for King Leopold of Belgium — devises a scheme that lures the couple to the Congo. Rom plans to capture Tarzan and deliver him to an old enemy in exchange for diamonds. When Jane becomes a pawn in his devious plot, Tarzan must return to the jungle to save the woman he loves.
Skarsgård, the Swedish actor, best known for his role as Eric in TV’s “True Blood”, plays Tarzan with a British-y accent, opposite Australian Margot Robbie as the American Jane, and Austrian-German actor Waltz who’s playing Rom the Belgian. Samuel L. Jackson is American and plays one (and shockingly delivers the least offensive performance of the film — quite a change of pace for him.)
Waltz, the two-time Oscar winner needs a different and better agent. He’s becoming typecast now, seemingly always playing the villain, or at least, a less-than-pleasant individual. This role comes on the heels of a less-than-memorable performance in last year’s insipid James Bond feature, “Spectre”.
Djimon Hounsou may also need to talk to someone about his career choices. He, too, seems to now be relegated to playing stereotypes, and in this flick, his character is a live-action cartoon, responsible for the entire movie’s most unbearable scenes, in what’s supposed to be an epic showdown with Tarzan.
That scene exemplifies and amplifies the implausibility of the whole film. I can appreciate and enjoy a compelling, out-of-this-world fantasy as much as anybody else. But “The Legend of Tarzan” wants to have its cake and eat it too, as the saying goes.
We are asked to suspend all belief in reality, all while it mixes in serious, real-life events and characters based on actual historical figures, like Waltz’s Captain Rom.
We’re asked to accept that Tarzan — whom we believe is human — is able to communicate with all the jungle’s animals telepathically! This, of course, begs too many questions. Surely, then, Tarzan could use his wonderful powers to get animals and humans all over the world to work together in greater harmony. (At least he should be able to broker peace once-and-for-all between dogs and cats or cats and mice.)
Also, how can a human man survive a brawl with a gorilla (with abandonment issues), and afterward act as though he’d just had a small dust-up with a drunkard in a bar? And the biggest question of all will center on the sheer ridiculousness of the entire central revenge theme.
To add insult to injury, the film progressively gets worse with each scene, culminating in one giant, eye-rolling and laughable disaster.
I wish the screenwriters and Director David Yates (who directed the final four Harry Potter films) had picked a side — either pure, unadulterated fantasy, or something more in touch with reality, which could be taken seriously.
For obvious reasons, comparisons with “The Jungle Book” are inevitable — as the two have historically been mentioned in the same breath. Unfortunately, for this Tarzan film, the latest incarnation of “The Jungle Book” has been the best film so far this year, and has raised the bar extremely high for all movies heavily dependent on computer graphics. It will be a while before anything can even come close; “Tarzan”, while visually impressive, is still not even in the same ballpark.
But more than that, the plotting, pacing, and characterizations in “The Jungle Book” are far superior. “Tarzan” instead is what would likely be the result had the former film’s production team all become inebriated and fell off the side of a mountain, sustaining massive head injuries, and instead of seeking medical attention, immediately returned to the set to begin work.
So yes, do yourself a favor, and go online and watch all the GEICO commercials ever produced back-to-back for about 110 minutes, or the one with Tarzan and Jane about 200 times. Many of those commercials feature animals, like lizards, pigs, and the aforementioned squirrels. You won’t miss a thing!
And better yet, the “It’s what you do” series with the mom and her spy son has spawned a hilarious series called “GEICO presents ‘Mom Observations’”; it features the same mom on the phone presumably telling her son about more of the inane happenings of her day.
All of these insurance commercials are a billion times more interesting than “The Legend of Tarzan”.
• Dwight Strachan is the host/producer of “ Morning Blend” on Guardian Radio. He is a television producer and writer, and an avid TV history and film buff. Email dwight@nasguard.com and follow him on twitter@morningblend969.
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