Wild Things: THE LEGEND OF TARZAN

How do you make a Tarzan movie in 2016? Over the character’s century of existence he’s been in everything from the original Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp novels, to classic studio programmers, cheap boy’s adventures, stately period piece epics, gauzy romances, and even an animated Disney musical with songs by Phil Collins. (The last one might be my personal favorite.) The story of a 19th century child, born in the jungles of Africa to shipwrecked British blue bloods, tragically orphaned, raised by apes, and who grew into a muscular wild man swinging from vines, is an old-fashioned and familiar one. What can possibly be done to make this a story worth retelling? Director David Yates’ solution is to play it straight and take it seriously, tapping into the feelings of displacement Tarzan has while torn between two worlds. The Legend of Tarzan is therefore a rip-snorting jungle adventure, a mournful story of loss, and a sober-minded reflection on the evils of colonialism. The film doesn’t always get the combination of these elements exactly right, but its heart is in the right place, and it’s an often-enjoyable entertainment.

This is a movie that begins with Tarzan (Alexander Skarsagård) already a legend, having met and married Jane (Margot Robbie) and moved to England years before the story begins. Invited back to Africa by a Belgian mercenary with ulterior motives (Christoph Waltz) and persuaded by an American adventurer who needs help proving the colonists are up to no good (Samuel L. Jackson, as a character loosely based on a real man), Tarzan decides to return to his childhood home, reuniting with the apes who raised him and the natives who taught him to become a human. He finds it’s nice to be back, but soon the bad guys attack, and the adventure through the jungle starts. The film began in the thick of colonial African politics, with the scheming Belgian cutting a deal with a vengeful chief (Djimon Hounsou) to trade Tarzan for diamonds. The reasons why are simple. The European needs money to help a bankrupt king pay for his army’s impending takeover of the Congo; the chief wants revenge for some previous scrape. The setup is clear and the villains obvious. Tarzan is in danger, and his return has endangered his loved ones.

Screenwriters Adam Cozad (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit) and Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow) supply an interesting narrative structure, a flashback origin story nestled inside a tale of domesticated Lord Greystoke feeling the pull of the wild. This is as much The Legend as it is Tarzan, his famous exploits the source of internal and external conflict, his present as much about how he’ll reconcile his past and his present as it is the action it inspires. Potential nostalgia for the old story is cut with the horror of its peril and the sadness of what’s become of this place as colonial powers encroach. This isn’t a light adventure about a boy scampering with animals. There are hints of a more traditional Tarzan in his upsetting and romantic past, while the present is a rescue mission to stop the looting invaders from enslaving the population and strip-mining the country’s resources. It’s a high-flying, vine-swinging matinee cliffhanger – with some corny lines and broad performances – in a heavier approach. The violence carries menace and weight, and the danger in stock B-movie scenarios is played for real impact.

Against this sturdy backdrop there’s an investment in the feelings of its leads. Skarsgård carries himself with strength and confidence in his physical abilities, and a hesitance in his interactions with other Europeans. Early scenes have him stiff in suits, coming to life when showing off his unusually strong hands, or when nimbly climbing a tree in his yard. It’s with the African people and places where he stretches out, more himself even when forced into an action plot. Then a key delight is watching the burgeoning buddy relationship with Jackson’s quipping, gun-slinging American (so fun and fully formed I wished he could ride into his own exciting adventure series), which brings some of the movie’s lightest capering moments while rarely taking away from the more contemplative tone. Elsewhere the filmmakers have tried to minimize potential elements of sexism and racism from the old setup, allowing Jane (Robbie is fine, even if the character isn’t quite as fully defined as her mate’s) some agency despite quickly becoming a damsel in distress, and giving the tribesmen some portion of personality and meaningful backstory before letting them slip into the background to let Tarzan save the day.

For a long stretch of its runtime this is a more thoughtful approach to Tarzan than we usually see, the action beats landing with visceral thuds in the subwoofer while built on a convincing life-and-death sensation growing naturally out of the emotional underpinnings, which makes concessions to overfamiliar spectacle in its back half disappointing. It culminates in a big stampeding climax that’s more routine than the fascinating early going. But the way there is an effective marriage of adventure with somber impulses, a chase through the jungle with shootouts, fistfights, vine swings, and encounters with wild animals, and an earnest engagement in the reality it creates for itself. Even though this is a movie that plays into tropes – convenient animal assistance; scowling one-note villains; emotional shorthand; flat exposition – there’s a commitment to treating Tarzan’s story with a degree of seriousness, wondering what it would be like to struggle with his place in the world. It doesn’t make this a fresh story, but it makes it a solidly engaging one.

It works because Yates is a real filmmaker with a steady hand. Years helming BBC political dramas and half of the Harry Potter movies have given him the confidence to treat this material seriously without feeling the need to apologize for the potentially sillier moments. He can stage a man fighting a gorilla or a lion nuzzling an old human friend and actually make it resonate with feeling, a fearful intensity in the former and a hushed tenderness in the latter. And then he can turn around and have sincere historical understanding of Belgian slavers in the Congo without feeling exploitative or cheapened. Yates grounds the proceedings in specificity, the handsomely mounted production designed by Stuart Craig (another Potter vet) and photographed by Henry Braham gleaming in cobblestone London, palatial manors, and lovely natural vistas of savanna, river, and jungle. As the movie is interested in examining its wilderness locations from the eyes of a man who was raised there, then left, and is now back again – and through its bifurcated structure that makes it an introduction and its own sequel – there’s an interesting tension powering the action.

Spy Spy Again: JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT

With justified worries over an encroaching surveillance state that has overreaching capabilities to snoop on anyone with technology of any kind, now is a fairly awkward time to mount a slick Hollywood thriller about heroes in the United States intelligence community. In Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit a critical third act sequence finds characters frantically searching through data, cross-referencing telephone calls, and pulling up vast amounts of info on suspects with just a few key strokes. That they’re doing all this with a ticking time bomb of an imminent terrorist plot on American soil is the exact same fantasy that the intelligence agencies use when trying desperately to justify their sweeping ability to keep tabs on everyone at all times. And yet, as a piece of Hollywood filmmaking, that fantasy goes down well enough in this case, especially with a script by Adam Cozad and David Koepp that’s aware of its pulpy fiction and seems somewhat aware of the real moral ambiguities. The thrust of the film is a freshly rebooted origin story for Jack Ryan, the C.I.A. analyst and reluctant field operative from Tom Clancy’s military industrial airport novels, and so the final shot which, unconsciously or not, echoes the final shot of The Godfather, makes welcoming him into The Company seem rather ominous indeed.

This time around, Jack Ryan (Chris Pine) is a bright graduate student who joins the Marines after September 11, 2001 and, after getting wounded in Afghanistan, is approached by a C.I.A. operative (Kevin Costner) with promise of a desk job sorting through financial records and analyzing the money flowing to and from terrorist organizations. Ten years later, Ryan finds some important information that sends him to Moscow where he’s quickly drawn into field work involving geopolitical intrigue and, yes, revelation of a terrorist plot about to blow up somewhere in the United States. Pine brings inquisitive puppy dog energy (imagine that) to his performance, playing at what another character labels as “Boy Scout on a field trip” behavior. He’s ready to serve his country, but caught off guard by a sudden and unexpected swerve out from behind his desk. Costner, with gravitas for days, is a sturdy guide, paternal and wise. He’s an actor who started out playing the young overeager hotshots that Pine gets cast as now, but has aged into a welcome sense of ease. He’s remarkably still, confident, and lends every line a sense of considered weight.

I liked the chemistry between these two, but Costner’s character is so intriguing that it’s a shame Pine’s Jack Ryan is a nonentity. He has a token love interest in Keira Knightley, who plays what is a typical girlfriend role in these kinds of movies, worrying he’s cheating on her with another woman when he’s only hiding his top-secret government employee status. Later, she’ll be in danger in order to fuel the plot. Again, how typical, even if the script gives their relationship a more mature glow than I expected. Even the villain, a tattooed Russian banker and sleeper cell coordinator, comes across as rather routine despite being played with chewy fun by Kenneth Branagh. (His character is described through his vices: vodka, vanity, and women. Say it with a Russian accent and the alliteration works better.) But who is Jack Ryan? With no defining characteristics beyond being a smart and patriotic white male government operative, and certainly with nothing more than vaguely identifiable personality traits, it’s often hard to see why the character is cause for such regular rebooting.

Each version seems to lose some of the energy and charisma, the character growing blander and less defined with each new script and performer. There was a young Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan in 1990’s The Hunt for Red October, a tense and tightly-wound character-driven thriller, then Harrison Ford took over a few years later, playing things older and slower in the sleepier Patriot Games and Clear and Pleasant Danger, before Ben Affleck gave it a go in 2002’s solid Sum of All Fears. Sturdy films all, they, Hunt aside, nonetheless carry about them a whiff of the generic. Who is this Jack Ryan? I certainly didn’t care by this point. If the would-be franchise hasn’t stuck yet, one would almost say it’s time to give up trying. And yet, it churns out such agreeably generic thrillers that I’d almost hate to see them go.

Shadow Recruit is so crisp and compact, likably human scale in its thriller sequences of people running, chasing, and sneaking. Branagh, who is also the director, doesn’t draw much on his Shakespearean chops, or even his work directing the half pseudo-Shakespearean Thor, but keeps the tension high enough. It’s all reasonably diverting and modestly plotted, a reminder of a time when a big studio movie didn’t need a fully CGI climax. With its small-scale stunt work and one big splashy effect saved for maximum impact, I’d call it a throwback if it weren’t so consumed with post-9/11 anxieties. I found it involving enough, though the only character I ever truly bought was Costner’s. It’s a fine example of brisk, anonymous, functional thriller craftsmanship, although it feels more like a promising restart than a fully satisfying thing on its own, like a pilot for a mildly intriguing TV show. Figuring out how to better make Jack Ryan a fully formed, or at least interesting or engaging, character would’ve been nice. So would a point of view on all the agency’s grey-area capabilities. But I have a feeling we’ll see this character again. Maybe by that time the rights’ holders will have it figured out.