Undescribable Perfection

Such a frustrating disappointment

A Brilliant Conflict

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

This movie features Tarzan going back to the jungle, but it's apparently not a sequel to anything. The special effects in this movie are just plain awful. The gorillas are so fake looking there's even a question asked here under the FAQ on why they're so bad looking. It gets really terrible near the end where you see this one guy turn into a giant CGI snake. Whether it's practical or CGI, the effects look awful either way. There's a lot going on in this movie, but it's so boring.There's just one random action sequence after another. The story is one of the most clichéd I've seen in a Tarzan movie. The slow motion gets annoying and it looks silly. I wanted to see how Tarzan got into suburbia in the first place. We get all this lame stuff about hidden gold and a hidden place with natives. This has been done so many times before in stuff like "Indiana Jones" and much better. *1/2

Since there was so much comment on the "fake gorillas," I think it is worth pointing out that these were not in fact intended to be gorillas but rather the fictional race of "great apes" that raised Tarzan in the Burroughs novels. They were supposed to be something closer to humans, with a language developed enough that it could be translated into English - in fact Tarzan was a word in the great ape language meaning "white skin." You can quibble about how successful the movie portrayal of these creatures was, but any Burroughs fan will recognize what they were trying to do. In any case, it was a brief sequence.I thought this movie was surprisingly good and came closer to capturing the flavor of Burroughs' later Tarzan novels than anything else I have seen. Burroughs, after all, was primarily a fantasy writer and there is no point in holding his fiction to any "realistic" standard. The production standards were quite good and I liked the principal actors. In fact, Van Dien may be my second favorite Tarzan, after Gordon Scott.

I just love it when classic pulp-styled heroes get the big-budget treatment from Hollywood. The Phantom, The Rocketeer, and The Shadow are all personal favourites of mine.Now we have "Tarzan and The Lost City," and while it is nowhere near the quality of the other films mentioned above, it is a fun little Saturday movie.The acting is never terrible, but never above acceptable either. Also, a lot of the sets, special effects, and cinematography, while service the film well enough as it is, feel more suited for an above-average TV movie, and not the major blockbuster the filmmakers were hoping for.Also, a lot of the ending does not make sense: Why does the Snake god need Tarzan, or even helping him out? His warriors were useless! A very simple-minded and fun PG Adventure film for the kids, and those who grew up on Ron Ely, but not much else.6/10

It's difficult to tell exactly when the sucking starts in this movie. I think - although I'm not sure here - that I heard faint slurping sounds during the opening credits. At any rate, about half-way through the first scene you can discern the telltale, unmistakable signs of profound "suck-icity." Now... in the credits posted here at the IMDb site, there are 10 producers listed. Ten! Almost an even dozen, folks. And evidently, not one of them, at any point, looked around to the other nine and hollered: "Let's jam a foot on the brake pedal right now! This monkey pic is suckin' the big banana!" There's a scene late in the movie - when you're about as slack-jawed and banged-up and dulled into insensibility as you're gonna get - that pretty much sums up the nature of suckdom in its universal state. The bad guys walk down a long promenade lined by these... weird... demon drummers. They arrive at the foot of a pyramid thingy and see a frightening looking guy with a big cobra crown on his head. One of the bad guys, suddenly jolted by a lucid realization, yells, "It's a trap!" That's about when I got REALLY angry that this thing had 10 producers.One of the few diversions you have, as this "Tarzan" grinds to the final credits, is look at Jane March and try to figure out how such an astringently starved, painfully thin woman could have such a big mouth. I mean, her mouth looks like a full-sized Peterbilt 12-ton tractor trailer with an 18-wheel cargo rig could fit in there. As long as she opens real wide, of course.It doesn't help the movie along that she can't act worth a deee-AM! But then again, everybody tries real hard to piggyback the script along by punching the ham button real hard. There's a lot of "IT'S THE GATEWAY TO HELL!" lines delivered with consummate commitment and praiseworthy straightfacedness. (Is that a word?) But nothing can keep "Tarzan and the Lost City" from sliding right off the vine.