They go, and, of course, they are correct. It’s a moral obligation that they take this voyage (with Williams standing in for the audience as we travel with Tarzan). Forget the business interests, he says: he believes King Leopold is building his empire on brutal slave labour. Based on an actual American civil war soldier, author and statesman who visited the Belgian Congo in 1889, Williams pulls the reluctant Clayton aside. Maybe our boy Clayton can find out what’s going on and stabilise things? (Yes, there’s an old British men v Brussels theme in this film, so fire up your Brexit analogy engines.)īefore we get a chance to suggest that British colonial history isn’t all roses, in walks the film’s get-out-of-jail-free card: Samuel L Jackson’s George Washington Williams. Broadbent and other captains of industry are troubled by the way King Leopold has cut off access to the Belgian Congo, causing economic unrest. However, powerful forces want to send him back. Undeniably cool … Djimon Hounsou as Chief Mbonga in The Legend of Tarzan. Now, he’s living in Greystoke manor with his fiery American wife, Jane ( Margot Robbie), and serving as a member of the House of Lords. The story commences after Clayton/Tarzan ( Alexander Skarsgård) is already a legend: raised by apes, beloved by local villagers, able to swing from vines and totes chill with every badass beast on the savanna. For that alone we lift our short glasses of dry sack and say chin-chin, as if we were Jim Broadbent in a ridiculous-looking beard (which he wears in his short, bookending scenes, toasting a bounteous expedition and cursing King Leopold II of Belgium).
The specifics of how he became Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, slips into the narrative in some well placed flashbacks, but this is not an origin story.
The Legend of Tarzan ends up being a garbled, clunky production that tries to please everyone and ends up pleasing no one.ĭirector David Yates, who inherited the beloved Harry Potter characters and brought that series home in its final four entries, makes the wise decision to assume everyone knows who John Clayton, Lord of Greystoke, is.
It comes late in the third act, emerging from off screen, thrown like a desperate, aural Hail Mary, a last ditch reminder that maybe this story about a man with ape-like superhero powers should be a tiny bit fun.