Here's a muddled and dull new family film about Tarzan, who in keeping with tradition is as clean-shaven and all-over hairless as any male stripper. It's basically an "origin" myth about the king of the apes, although the precise origin of that loincloth is as big a mystery as ever. Walt Disney's ownership of the copyright having expired, the German firm Constantin Films opened its chequebook and cranked out this English-language Disney knock-off: a very moderate motion-capture animation, stripping the tale of any wit and burdening it with a pointless and baffling sci-fi backstory about the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. The writer-director is veteran German producer Reinhard Klooss; Kellan Lutz voices Tarzan and Spencer Locke is Jane. The idea is thatTarzan's jungle is the secret location of the prehistoric meteor's landing site; the fallen rock has become a giant, mysterious crystal seeding our planet with all sorts of precious life, thus making its jungly environs a Shangri-La site of ecological preciousness, about to be desecrated by sinister corporations, who are liable to kill Tarzan and his simian loved ones. They didn't have much life in the first place.
With a baffling backstory about the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, this new jungle animation does not go with a swing