A ‘legend Of Tarzan’ That’s A Strange Jumble In The Jungle

Congo at this time was under the control of King Leopold of Belgium, and one of his agents in charge was a fellow named Leon Rom, who was such a horrible human being that Christoph Waltz plays him here. In “The Legend of Tarzan,” he is wiping out elephants for the ivory and impressing the native people into slavery. There’s a turn of mind here that’s arresting and expressed in an odd ways, as when he reaches across a table and corrects an imprecision in the cutlery. Killing people doesn’t bother him, but a fork in the wrong place really gets under his skin. Skarsgard is physically impressive, however, tall enough to make Jackson seem short, and he clearly spent hundreds of hours in the gym in preparation for taking off his shirt. [...] though the movie makes an attempt to justify it, Rom’s motive for kidnapping Jane makes little sense. Every time Waltz is in conversation with Robbie, who is as radiant and straightforward here as Waltz is dark and skewed, the movie wakes up. [...] the close-ups of lions, apes and elephants have the appeal of a trip to the zoo, without the accompanying sad feeling of seeing animals imprisoned. [...] there is something strangely dead about most of the film, which is mostly just a succession of scenes lacking energy, suspense or interest. [...] what we have here is a Tarzan movie made by people who don’t understand the appeal of Tarzan.