Legend Of Tarzan Cast 2016

Since 1918, there have been exactly 17 actors to play the King of the Jungle on the screen, and each and every one of them has the same excruciating fatal flaw: They're all white as a bowl of peeled potatoes.

This is, of course, very much in keeping with Edgar Rice Burroughs' original novel. In a series of some 24 such tomes, Tarzan is depicted as a young baby whose white parents are killed by an angry ape king. He is then taken in by an ape mother, who raises him as one of her own (a very similar setup to Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book, only with apes in place of wolves -- what, mother animals in the jungle have literally nothing better to do?). Eventually, Tarzan comes to find his true lineage -- he comes from extremely wealthy British nobility -- and takes his place among his fellow lords and ladies, alongside the beautiful Jane, a comely white woman he met in the jungle.

The Legend of Tarzan

79 Cast: Alexander Skarsgard, Margot Robbie, Samuel L. Jackson, Christoph Waltz, Rory J. Saper, Christian Stevens

Even though The Legend Of Tarzan won't hit theaters until July 1, the team behind the film is already discussing a sequel. Back in April, director David Yates and actor Alexander Skarsgard met. Shop The Legend of Tarzan DVD 2016 at Best Buy. Find low everyday prices and buy online for delivery or in-store pick-up. Avalon legends solitaire free download. Price Match Guarantee.

Director: David Yates

Rating: PG-13. for sequences of action and violence, some sensuality and brief rude dialogue

Running time: 109 minutes

On the one hand, you can understand why filmmakers have always stuck to this part of the story: The tricky, overtly racist colonial politics of the character -- a white man is named king of the jungle in Africa and comes to be feared, adored and respected by the natives of the Congo -- are an inherent part of the mythos, as much as Superman's escape as a baby from a dying Krypton. Back in 1918, it also was more or less in keeping with the prevailing politics of the time, but now, nearly a century later, there is simply no excuse: It's a celebration of the worst kind of Anglo exceptionalism.

The Legend of Tarzan finds the reformed jungle lord, John Clayton III (Alexander Skarsgard), already out of the bush and living in royal comfort with wife Jane (Margot Robbie) back at his family estate, satisfied, it would seem, with a life of privilege and dull execution. This all changes when he is given a royal invitation by King Leopold of Belgium -- busy trying to reap and bleed all he can out of the Congo before his kingdom goes bankrupt -- to return to his native land. Tarzan hesitatingly takes the opportunity, but only after an American operative, George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson), convinces him that Leopold might be enslaving the natives to carry out his plundering and they might need his help.

Naturally, Jane accompanies them, and before too long they become ensnared in the not-so-elegant trap put together by Leopold's appointed henchman Leon Rom (Christoph Waltz), a man so evil he spends the entire film draped in fine, white-linen suits. When Tarzan and Jane return to the extremely hospitable tribe with whom they used to live, Rom baits the jungle lord and makes off with Jane, setting off an extended chase through the jungle Tarzan once lived and breathed in. Along the way, he is helped and befriended by Williams, who proves a deft shot, even if he can't quite keep up with Tarzan's relentless, vine-aided pace.

By this time, the film, directed by longtime Harry Potter veteran David Yates, truly loses its sense of grounding. Once in the jungle, Tarzan is nothing short of a shirtless superhero, laying waste to entire convoys of soldiers with nary a scratch, and whipping through the high jungle canopy like Spider-Man swinging through Manhattan, all the while leaving Williams, mouth set permanently to full-agape, in the dust. Indeed, through most of the film, it is Jackson's thankless job to do all the stunned reacting to Tarzan's bevy of impressive powers. Every so often they see fit to give him a gun to shoot, but for the most part, he's as much an observer of the glory of the king of the apes as the rest of us.

Which makes a hideous kind of sense: In a somewhat ironic twist, Jackson's character is there in an attempt to at least mitigate a bit of the story's most obviously racist overtones, giving Tarzan a black sidekick to pal around with, which comes in extremely handy when the pair are confronted by an intensely hostile native tribe led by the fearsome Chief Mbonga (Djimon Hounsou), who has harbored a deep-seated grudge against Tarzan for years.

Political ramifications aside, Yates' film is also simply not very good. Whatever care and character work the filmmaker and his cast put into the first half -- especially by Waltz, an actor who always seems to take supreme pleasure in depicting his roles -- by the third act, is all thrown into the white-hot bonfire of Action Pacing. It also doesn't help that the titular character is so aggressively dull. This iteration of Tarzan finds the hulking Skarsgard less a brooding man caught between very different worlds, and more a stooge for his beautiful wife, a vapid, preening hero who symbolizes the perfect synergy of white privilege and jungle ethics.

Nevertheless, as the film gambols toward its inevitable fiery climax, it gets sloppier and sloppier with its storytelling and political restraint. By the end, with the many tribes of the Congo looking on from high up on the edge of a hilly cliff, cheering as if at a World Cup match, Tarzan enlists the (inevitable) aid of several thousand animals to trample the hapless Belgian army and send the survivors back home empty-handed, apparently striking a mortal blow into the belly of colonialism while completely eradicating the slave trade in the process. Good for him.

MovieStyle on 07/01/2016