BEFORE: Christoph Waltz carries over again from "Carnage", and after this I'll follow the Samuel L. Jackson path - that should get me ALMOST to my 3-film Mother's Day tribute.
Once again, Turner Classic Movies and I are on the same page - they're running a "Tarzan" marathon starting today at 8 pm with 1932's "Tarzan the Ape Man", followed by at least 16 more Tarzan films, probably in chronological order, and then following that with a Jungle Jim marathon, and then more with Bomba the Jungle Boy. But I don't have time for any of that, nor do I have enough space on my DVR. No, just one "Tarzan" film for me, then I'm on to something else.
THE PLOT: Having acclimated to life in London, Tarzan is called back to his former home in the Congo to investigate the activities at a mining encampment.
AFTER: Why am I not surprised that once again, someone started the story in the freakin' MIDDLE of things, with Tarzan having been re-civilized and living in London for 8 years, thus enabling them to tell his whole origin in a series of flashbacks? It's like a money-saving (or time-saving) attempt to squeeze two movies into one, the origin tale and the follow-up movie. Sure, nobody's doing anything linearly, from start to finish any more, so what the heck?
It's not very complete this way, because although we get to see Tarzan meet Jane, they get to skip over that awkward getting-to-know-you part, or any of the details of how or why this jungle man moved to London and took his proper title and his place in parliament. Umm, sure, OK, why not have a guy swinging on a vine into the House of Lords? Or climbing up Big Ben like it's a cliff wall or something?
But just when he thought he was out, something pulls him back in - those no-good Belgians, of course, who are suspected of running diamond mines with African slaves, and an American man who's naturally against slavery (didn't the Belgians ever hear of the Emancipation Proclamation) enlists Tarzan to head back there and shut them down.
Jane insists on coming along, reminding her husband Tarzan that she grew up in the jungles of Africa, too, and that's where all of their friends are. So, why is it that they live in London, again? Oh, yeah, he's also Lord Greystoke. But if they're not happy in the urban jungle, why not live in the real one?
It's great that they finally made a "Tarzan" movie with modern special effects, but haven't we been here before? Between the motion-capture "King Kong" and "Planet of the Apes" movies, why does it seem that outside the "Lord of the Rings" movies, the only thing we can animate is monkeys and apes? OK, so "The Jungle Book" had all kinds of animals in it, but there were prominent monkey characters also. Is Hollywood really doing all that it can with this technology, or just covering the same ground, again and again?
I've got the same NITPICK POINT that I had with films like "The Jungle Book" and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull". In all of these movies, swinging from jungle vines is portrayed in an impossible way, essentially one vine will take a character anywhere he wants or needs to swing, and in this film the vines somehow also magically reverse or spin in circles if needed. In reality, if you could swing from a vine, it would take you only in one direction, and you'd be in a constant state of getting lower to the ground, because the vine would take you in an arc-type motion. Unless you reached the lowest point in the swing, which would mean you would rise up a little bit on the other end of the swing, but you'd also be slowing down, and eventually you'd reach the farthest point and then swing backwards, and none of that happens here.
This story is more or less what you would expect, in fact it feels a lot like a western, what with railroads somehow being built across the Congo, and an emphasis on diamond mining instead of gold prospecting. Just replace the Native American tribes with a tribe of native Africans, and this film isn't all that different from the 2013 "Lone Ranger" film.
Also starring Alexander Skarsgard (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "The Hateful Eight"), Margot Robbie (last seen in "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot"), Djimon Hounsou (last seen in "Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life"), Jim Broadbent (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Ben Chaplin (last seen in "Snowden"), Casper Crump, Hadley Fraser (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Genevieve O'Reilly (last seen in "Rogue One"), Yule Masiteng, Osy Ikhile, Mimi Ndiweni, Simon Russell Beale, and motion-capture of Matt Cross, Madeleine Worrall, William Wollen.
RATING: 5 out of 10 stampeding ostriches
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