Kritiken

Rather than focusing solely on the Lord of the Jungle's hoary origin myth or his Pygmalion-like makeover in the UK, the film centers on King Leopold II's horrific regime in the Congo—he collected a fortune in rubber and ivory through the wholesale exploitation of Congolese natives—and its devastating effect on humans and animals alike. It's a bold choice for such commercial fare. Unfortunately, Yates misses a real opportunity to dramatize the film's antiracist and anticolonialist messages.

The Legend of Tarzan does what it says on the box, and more. It's the kind of jungle adventure where Tarzan treats a wound by using ants as stitches, making them grip the gash then cutting off the other end and eating it (they taste "like bacon", apparently) – but it's also smart enough to make you wonder if it's a deliberate Nazi reference (from Cabaret) when nasty Leon says "Tomorrow belongs to me". In other words it's still a Tarzan movie, just materially enhanced.

it's impossible for art to move things forward if we simply think of the past as a place where everyone got everything wrong. With The Legend of Tarzan, Yates gives us the best possible Tarzan for our time, one who seems to know intuitively what a complicated minefield he's stepping onto. That doesn't diminish the pleasures of the movie—it simply makes us feel better about savoring them.

"The Legend of Tarzan" has a whole lot of fun, big-screen things going for it — adventure, romance, natural landscapes, digital animals and oceans of rippling handsome man-muscle. Its sweep and easy pleasures come from its old-fashioned escapades — it's one long dash through the jungle by foot, train, boat and swinging vine — but what makes it more enjoyable than other recycled stories of this type is that the filmmakers have given Tarzan a thoughtful, imperfect makeover.

Sometimes filmmakers try to do the right thing and it comes out wrong, as it does in "The Legend of Tarzan." The movie conveys an earnest effort on the part of the producers, the screenwriters, and the director to reboot Tarzan on virtuous principles, but the results feel constrained to that virtue. Despite the gratifications of rewarded justice that the story delivers, every narrative twist feels calculated to that good-natured end.

The film's action sequences are a jumble of movement and cuts that have no discernible relation to the actual motion of the characters... Yates makes up for such spatial incoherence with his more character-focused moments, in which the filmmaker brings out the actors' subtle flourishes.

When one has a trademark, one must exploit it. But the wisdom of propagating any kind of white savior narrative during the charged era of Black Lives Matter surely must have seemed dubious, no? ...Strangely enough, though, if you can put these considerations aside—or, I suppose, if you never cared about such considerations in the first place—"The Legend of Tarzan" is a pretty good action-adventure movie.