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Misstep After Misstep

There's no getting around it: 'Tarzan' is awful.

Tarzan begins with the arrival of a meteor on Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs. This might seem like a strange way to begin a movie that features the classic Edgar Rice Burroughs character, and it is. It’s only the first misstep in what will soon become a cavalcade of them, the film seemingly set on making the film as awkward and confused as possible. The movie is ugly, poorly paced, badly voiced, narratively deficient, and overall just a really bad time.

The meteor that kicks off the film falls somewhere in the middle of the African jungle, buried under a mountain. The film introduces us to young JJ, a four year-old who’s come along to Africa with his parents, who are looking for the meteor. They inadvertently find it on the helicopter ride home, and JJ’s father ends up taking a piece of the meteor. This proves to be a mistake, as the environment suddenly grows inhospitable. Their helicopter crashes, and only young JJ survives. He’s found by a mountain gorilla that just lost her child, and he’s raised as one of her own.

The plot mainly concerns an evil corporation looking for the meteor. In short, the film is about something that the Tarzan character has very little do with. There is nothing particularly wrong with adding a shade of sci-fi to the Tarzan milieu, but the film doesn’t really do anything with it. The meteor is nakedly just a McGuffin. It does so many things. It’s an energy source. It’s somehow sentient. It transforms the nearby vegetation into hideous things. And there’s no real rhyme or reason behind any of it. It’s just whatever the plot requires it to be.

The film as a whole just isn’t very good at telling a story. It never goes very deep into anything. The film is set in modern times, but its characterizations are downright archaic. The villains are broad and evil in terribly boring ways. Tarzan and Jane seem to have a romance based entirely on proximity and pervy leering. To be quite serious, the film gets pretty creepy in depicting Tarzan’s attraction to Jane. The film gets the balance between children’s and adult’s entertainment horribly wrong.

It does not help at all that the animation is so awful. The character designs are flat and unimaginative, and everything moves pretty awkwardly. Vocal performances aren’t any better. Kellan Lutz can’t seem to decide on a single voice for Tarzan. It shifts from scene to scene, at times losing all sense of the character’s history. Lutz seems to be the rare actor whose awfulness comes through even when just doing voiceover work.

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There’s no getting around it: Tarzan is awful. It is awful pretty much from minute one. From there, it just keeps getting weirder and more unbearable, the film continuing to make choices that only lead it down a more horrid path. It burdens the classic story with a lot of extra nonsense, none of it adding up to very much. And it doesn’t even manage to look good, which these days seems incredibly rare. All we’re left with is all the awkwardness that fills up the scenes, the grand portrait of discomfort formed with every misstep.

My Rating:

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