Yes, he does the yell. It comes late in the third act, emerging from off screen, thrown like a desperate, aural Hail Mary, a last ditch reminder that maybe this story about a man with ape-like superhero powers should be a tiny bit fun. But it’s too little, too late. The Legend of Tarzan ends up being a garbled, clunky production that tries to please everyone and ends up pleasing no one.

Director David Yates, who inherited the beloved Harry Potter characters and brought that series home in its final four entries, makes the wise decision to assume everyone knows who John Clayton, Lord of Greystoke, is. The specifics of how he became Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, slips into the narrative in some well placed flashbacks, but this is not an origin story. For that alone we lift our short glasses of dry sack and say chin-chin, as if we were Jim Broadbent in a ridiculous-looking beard (which he wears in his short, bookending scenes, toasting a bounteous expedition and cursing King Leopold II of Belgium).

The story commences after Clayton/Tarzan (Alexander Skarsgård) is already a legend: raised by apes, beloved by local villagers, able to swing from vines and totes chill with every badass beast on the savanna. Now, he’s living in Greystoke manor with his fiery American wife, Jane (Margot Robbie), and serving as a member of the House of Lords.

Undeniably cool … Djimon Hounsou as Chief Mbonga in The Legend of Tarzan. Photograph: Jonathan Olley/AP

However, powerful forces want to send him back. Broadbent and other captains of industry are troubled by the way King Leopold has cut off access to the Belgian Congo, causing economic unrest. Maybe our boy Clayton can find out what’s going on and stabilise things? (Yes, there’s an old British men v Brussels theme in this film, so fire up your Brexit analogy engines.)

Before we get a chance to suggest that British colonial history isn’t all roses, in walks the film’s get-out-of-jail-free card: Samuel L Jackson’s George Washington Williams. Based on an actual American civil war soldier, author and statesman who visited the Belgian Congo in 1889, Williams pulls the reluctant Clayton aside. Forget the business interests, he says: he believes King Leopold is building his empire on brutal slave labour. It’s a moral obligation that they take this voyage (with Williams standing in for the audience as we travel with Tarzan).

They go, and, of course, they are correct. There are images in this film of dazed Africans chained at the neck, being carted around in train compartments. It comes couched between a jaunty action sequence of vine-swinging and a WWE-style smackdown of dazed baddies from a shirtless wall of muscle, complete with a “bonk!” sound effect in the spirit of the Three Stooges. This 10-minute stretch should be shown in film schools as part of a masterclass on how to blend styles in the least effective and most inappropriate manner possible.

Christoph Waltz, doing his usual kooky bad guy schtick. Photograph: Jonathan Olley/AP

Tone-deafness aside, the film has plenty of troubles. For starters, it doesn’t look good. Most of the scenes with computer-generated animals (lions, elephants and especially gorillas) are in the rain or dark or some sort of mist. Instead of inspiring awe, it led me to take off my glasses and check they weren’t smudged. I don’t know if the recent Jungle Book’s computer whizzes had greater processing power, more time to render their shots or simply more dough, but the difference between the two films is extraordinary.

There’s also the tedium of its rote story. Christoph Waltz, doing his usual kooky bad guy schtick, is King Leopold’s emissary, and he has worked out a complicated plot that involves getting a bunch of diamonds if he hands over Tarzan to Chief Mbonga (Djimon Hounsou), a fearsome warrior who wears the head of a leopard as a cowl and claws over his fists. (Although he has few lines, Hounsou is undeniably cool in a superhero-film kind of way.) Mbonga holds a grudge against Tarzan, which we learn about in flashbacks. We also see glimpses of Tarzan’s early years as an orphan raised by apes, and his time as a feral man-beast.

Kudos to Skarsgård for not pussyfooting around. He doesn’t quite bang on his chest, but he aspirates in a simian fashion; while it’s impossible not to laugh, he basically sells it. Robbie’s Jane (the daughter of an American teacher who tames the wild man before they fall in love) is bright and sunny and, like Rey in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, loath to be considered a damsel in distress.

There is, however, the uncomfortable optic of this glorious white couple being cheered and paraded around by their happy, loving black pals. There are at least half a dozen images begging to be used as internet memes. Admittedly, this is no way to watch a film, but image-making is what it is, and The Legend of Tarzan is going to make a lot of people feel uncomfortable. Moreover, few will come to its aid, because it’s so dull and silly. When Tarzan leads a phalanx of computer-generated wildebeests like TE Lawrence into Aqaba, the audience is not supposed to laugh.

This film was always going to be inherently problematic. If the studio spoke to any 13-year-olds, they would discover that there’s hardly an itch for a Tarzan film, even if it’s that most shimmering jewel: a dormant intellectual property everyone has heard of. The producers have bent over backwards to mitigate unease as much as possible, and not only by keeping Samuel L Jackson in every other scene so we can say: “Well, if he thinks this isn’t racist, it must not be.”

There’s an anti-greed message and a green message and a feminist message, but there are also the asinine Hollywood story beats that must be hit. A zillion tribesmen must cheer when King Leopold’s stooge is defeated, because Belgium never troubled the Congo again, right?

The best way to do a Tarzan film in 2016? Find a new story to tell instead.