

I learned quickly, and grew stronger each day, and now I share the friendship and trust of all jungle animals.

I would have soon perished, too, had I not been found by a kindly she-ape named Kala, who adopted me as her own and taught me the ways of the wild. Read the complete movie review here."The jungle: Here I was born and here my parents died when I was but an infant. The present tense adventure feels rushed and paper-thin.

The lush and occasionally gorgeous picture runs just 109 minutes yet gets bogged down by copious flashbacks and digressions which leaves little time for its actual story. This truncated adventure story has little else to offer beyond visual pleasures and periodic moments of fluid action choreography and solid chemistry between Alexander Skarsgård and Samuel L. If marketing-based decisions didn't sometimes lead to entertaining movies, Hollywood would be a ghost town, but here we have talented people on both sides of the camera still creating a movie that's painfully rote. There's never a moment in this new film that comes off like anyone involved was driven or aching to put a new spin on Tarzan instead, it's a reflection of public awareness of the character, whose name gets a little registered trademark symbol in the opening and closing credits. But the filmmakers-four-time Harry Potter director David Yates and writers Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer, with heavy utility assistance from The Golden Compass cinematographer Henry Braham and a bevy of digital-effects companies-seem to have many different aims that are only partially compatible. It’s impossible to guess how narratively and tonally divided Legend is from the trailers, which present it as a standard-issue fantasy/historical epic, or maybe the latest “brand deposit” live-action version of an existing Disney movie. The Legend Of Tarzan, and there’s no clear winner to the war. There are a dozen films fighting for supremacy in Warner Bros.

If the studio spoke to any 13-year-olds, they would discover that there’s hardly an itch for a Tarzan film, even if it’s that most shimmering jewel: a dormant intellectual property everyone has heard of. This film was always going to be inherently problematic. Jackson, Margot Robbie, Djimon Hounsou, Jim Broadbent and Christoph Waltz: Here's what the critics are saying about The Legend of Tarzan, starring Alexander Skarsgård, Samuel L.
