Thursday, July 7, 2016

The Legend of Tarzan

When it all comes down to it, if you really pressed most men out there to tell the truth, they’d eventually break down and admit that they miss the days when you could simply go outside, club a woman over the head, throw her over your shoulder as you take her back to your cave, and instantly make her your wife. Things were so much simpler then; you didn’t have to worry about paying bills because lights (fire) and water (the river) were free, you could have all the pets you wanted because you lived and camped amongst the wild, and if any dude ever tried to step to your woman, you’d fight him to the death and that would be the end of it.

But no, nowadays you have to put up all these cool photos of yourself online and hope like crazy that some disease free woman swipes right on your profile. And then after that you still have to do a song and dance to try and convince them to ignore the 20,000 other muscle-bound douchebags who are out there hiding around the corner wearing black and white striped shirts and Zorro masks just waiting for you to go to the restroom so they can swoop in and steal your girl! That was a Hamburglar reference by the way and that last sentence was intentionally a run on because I wanted it to sound like a Dennis Miller rant. But moving on…

So needless to say that in spite of all the awful reviews The Legend of Tarzan received on its opening weekend, a ton of people still went to out of their way to see it simply so they could reminisce about the good ol’ glory days. Sadly I too happened to be one of these people and I must say that I wish someone was there to club ME over the head when I made the decision to waste my money and my time on this listless attempt to revive a classic childhood story.

The Legend of Tarzan is about Tarzan’s (Alexander Skarsgard) unnecessary return to the wild after he had been discovered and "rescued" from his familiar surroundings by the ever curious and spunky Jane (Margot Robbie). Tarzan, due to the desperate request of Belgium’s King Leopold, is ostensibly returning to the Congo to be the face of the king’s tireless rebuilding efforts down there. However U.S. representative George Washington Williams (Sam Jackson) isn’t buying the king’s story so he convinces Tarzan to let him tag along to make sure that Leopold isn’t in fact exploiting the natives for his own slave labor. The Congo, as you can imagine, is full of valuable natural resources such as ivory and diamonds and unscrupulous men like Leopold and his main henchman Leon Rom (Chritoph Waltz) will do anything they can to get their hands on it.

Well once they get to Tarzan and Jane’s old stomping grounds, George’s fears are not only confirmed but they also discover that something far more sinister is in the works. So now it’s up to Tarzan to get reacclimated with his roots as quickly as possible so that he can save the lives of his Congolese brethren and his wife Jane, who has been kidnapped by Rom.

Now I give the writers props for being the first in recent memory to tackle just how awful of a person King Leopold was in real life but that’s about where my praises will end. They would’ve been much better served focusing on the upbringing of Tarzan and allowing us to see just how he became the legend of the jungle as opposed to the mess we ended up with today. They did attempt to do so in a few flashback scenes but these clear highlights of the film were few and far between. Instead we got a story that became so convoluted that it ultimately fell under itself by the time the third act arrived and Tarzan had wildebeests blindly throwing themselves into the ocean for no apparent reason.

This disaster was poor filmmaking at every level. There were so many scenes that had poor lighting and terrible angles that even in non-action set pieces you couldn’t really tell what was going on. And I swear that by the time the film’s climatic fight scene came along, the editor got drunk like Hugh Jackman did when he was hacking computers in Swordfish and chopped up nearly half of the footage he had available to him. You seriously had no clue what was going on or why.

But I guess I should thank Hollywood for giving me a taste of what to expect when the awful Ghostbusters comes out in a few weeks. If you’re going to completely ruin my childhood, you may as well give me an appetizer to chew on first. I rate this movie as unbelievably WEAK!

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