
Williams’s polar opposite is the resident villain, Leon Rom (Christoph Waltz, predictably good), a silky, uncomplicated sadist who embodies rapacious evil from his all-white suit to his crosslike weapon.

More interesting, especially given how routine colonialist fantasies tend to play out, it is Williams who voices the complexities, catastrophic errors and redemptive efforts of the so-called civilized world, a screen job usually given to white saviors.
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Here, though, Williams is basically an elevated sidekick as well as a physician, war veteran and crack shot who’s as proficient at suturing wounds with insects as he is mowing down swaths of white mercenaries. Margot Robbie in “The Legend of Tarzan.” Credit. Already married to Lady Jane ( Margot Robbie, holding her own), Tarzan now goes by John Clayton, having years earlier returned to nominal civilization and its discontents. It’s a grim start to this make-believe, but the mood lifts at Greystoke Manor, Tarzan’s ancestral pad in Britain, where he’s broodily prowling about like a caged animal. He gets one by proxy in “The Legend of Tarzan,” which opens with some historically informed text about King Leopold II of Belgium (1835-1909), known as the butcher of Congo for his role in murdering millions. Skarsgard is also a fine actor with an enigmatic melancholy, a quality that has been put to expressive use in small roles in movies like “What Maisie Knew” and that here suggests Tarzan carries a profound burden that makes him more complex than the usual beefcake in loincloth.Īnd Tarzan needs a burden, something heavy enough to justify the exhumation of such a difficult fantasy figure. (He isn’t playing nerd boy of the jungle.) Mr. Skarsgard’s considerable physical charms, though these are central to the character. Skarsgard, who spent a lot of time baring his body, along with vampire fangs, on the HBO show “True Blood,” indicates that the filmmakers understand a primal part of Tarzan’s allure.
