“Tarzan 2016” is a thing. What starts promisingly with Christoph Waltz & the great Djimon Hounsou squaring off is squashed once the title screen arrives, and conscious viewers notice the ‘registered trademark’ icon next to the logo. It still begs belief eight years post-release and reeks of corporate interference & franchise ensnarement. It’s mind-boggling thinking of what legal finagling forced such a decision – then you pause the movie on Netflix and it displays the logo on its idle screen without it. It isn’t even on the poster!

You can’t say the writers didn’t try to do something different: instead of another origin story, we open with an edified, middle-aged Tarzan, who retrogresses when he’s used as a pawn in the Congolese mineral trade. But then Waltz’s bad guy devolves into the one-dimensional schtick we’ve seen him do in every role since “Inglorious Basterds”, dragging Margot Robbie’s Jane from one set-piece to another while Alexander Skarsgård’s admittedly-shredded Tarzan is in hot pursuit. The action becomes the only point to the Sisyphysian push-and-pull, and the action scenes are a mish-mash of poor CGI & muted colours. While they’re thankfully not hyper-edited, anything in motion just looks like blobs – particularly the swinging-through-trees, which recall the ‘surfing’ from the 1999 Disney film.

The Casting Director got their budget’s worth, though. Acting is Tarzan 2016’s strongest quality, but was this caliber of work necessary here? Even Samuel L. Jackson had a chance to ham it up a bit, but he’s relatively low-key as the sidekick. There’s a five-second shot where Jackson lands on a tree branch and looks down, and he’s supposed to be hundreds of feet in the air but in reality it’s probably just a green screen beneath him, and it’s believable. I wish the cast’s effort had gone to a story with more follow-through: if not a “Birth of Tarzan” then maybe “Tarzan in Europe”.

2 out of 5