Casper Van Dien joins a long list of actors/athletes to essay the part of Edgar Rice Burroughs famous man of the jungle. As far as looks go he certainly fits the role, loincloth and all.
Tarzan is as eternal on the screen in his history as Sherlock Holmes. Both of them if you remember were brought up to date during World War II to aid the Allied effort. And Tarzan had several modern adventures through his many films and television roles right up through the nineties.
But on the cusp of a new millennium the Ape Man is returned to the period in time where Edgar Rice Burroughs set him in, clearly in British colonial Africa. Tarzan in fact has returned home to claim the title of the Earl of Greystoke and he's going to marry Jane March as Jane Porter.
But Van Dien gets one of those instinctive feelings, the kind that Chuck Norris gets when his Cherokee people are in trouble on Walker, Texas Ranger. He postpones the wedding to an exasperated Jane and heads to Africa.
Some of his native friends are indeed in trouble. A scientist who's hired a bunch of what would be called trailer park trash now is on the verge of discovering a lost city with untold wealth. It will make things worse than ever for the natives under colonialism if this archaeological Holy Grail is discovered.
Casper tries to reason with the scientist and then takes the more Tarzan like approach to the problem. But things do get real complicated when Jane follows him to Africa.
Tarzan and the Lost City is an old style adventure story with the benefit of 90s computer graphics. It's also politically sensitive, not portraying the natives as they were in those old Tarzan films from the studio days. And of course it's filmed entirely in Africa, certainly not done by MGM or RKO back in the day.
In the jungle Casper's great to look at and a wonder to behold. But why did he try to adopt that English accent. He sounded silly when he used it. You notice Johnny Weissmuller never even attempted one. Of course they did keep his dialog to a minimum.
Despite the accent, this latest big screen Tarzan is a good film and Casper Van Dien is a worthy successor to Johnny Weissmuller, Lex Barker, Gordon Scott, etc.
