The 90s just really couldn’t get the old pulp heroes right, could they? After Tim Burton created a cinematic sensation with his highly stylized tale on Batman, there seemed to be something of a mad rush to try and bring a clutch of old school do-gooders onto the big screen to capitalize on the public’s thirst for derring do. However, things didn’t quite go to plan and after the release of Warren Beatty’s sizable Dick (Tracy, that is), audiences seemed to lose interest fairly quickly after facing an onslaught of golden age heroes such as The Rocketeer, The Shadow, The Spirit and The Phantom despite the fact that some of them were actually quite fun.
But while a few scored big at the box office (The Mark Of Zorro carved its initial into the bank with aplomb), others stumbled back into cinematic obscurity almost immediately and surely the biggest casualty was that of 1998’s attempt to bring Tarzan back to the big screen.
Technically in stasis since the last “official” entry that swung along in 1984 with the gritty Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan, Lord Of The Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ timeless adventurer popped up in the 90s with Casper Van Dien wearing the loin cloth. However, the result caused people to stampede from theatres faster than you could say Ungawa.
We join Tarzan living in England and forsaking his stage name for the more normal sounding John Clayton II as he prepares to marry his love, Jane Porter. However, after receiving a vision of his jungle kingdom in flames (because that’s something he can do now apparently), he ditches his beloved on her wedding night like a first class bounder an heads back to Africa with the power of twenty white saviors.
It turns out that treasure seeker and ruthless adventurer Nigel Ravens has made it his make or break mission to locate the legendary city of Opar in order to obtain fortune and glory while leaving a swathe of death and destruction in his wake. After speaking with a rightly outraged tribe who is led by the shaman Mugambe and his headstrong son, Kaya, Tarzan sets out to stop his latest, plundering foe, but unbeknownst to him his jilted spouse, Jane, has followed him to Africa.
What transpires is a mad chase through the cradle of life as Tarzan aims to stop his nemesis and his motley crew of thugs before they find the lost city and cause Africa to get ravaged by others who would want to wring the continent dry of every valuable is has. However, between Jane getting either kidnapped or getting stalked by every living thing in the jungle and Tarzan weathering a potentially fatal snake bite, can our studly hero and his pistol packing beau to be stop Ravens from accomplishing his selfish dream?
Of all the attempts to revive the pulped that I previously mentioned, Tarzan And The Lost City proves to be the worst and is probably the best example going that if Hollywood simply doesn’t “get” something, it just simply isn’t going to work. It also probably didn’t help this movie’s case that Disney’s animated version of the vine swinging hunk was barely only a year away – but the chief reason that this 90s attempt at the Lord Of The Apes didn’t fly is simply that it stinks of ape shit. Say what you will about the other attempts to breathe new life into old-timey heroes, at least most of the time you could see where the money was spent as the Rocketeer sped across the skies courtesy of some classic Phil Tippett animation and Dick Tracy’s rogue’s gallery were played by thespian in Oscar winning prosthetics. Here, poor old Tarzan looks like he has to square up to the forces of evil armed with a budget for a 90s TV pilot and in some cases, even comes off looking second best to episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys or Xena: Warrior Princess. Adding to this is a pace that would make most 90s cartoon shows seem like an 80s episode of Emmerdale and frequent feels like someone’s taken eight episodes of a television show and butchered it down to squeeze into a crammed 83 minutes while never skipping a single action sequence.
The result is a loud, headache inducing sprint from start to finish that is as painfully bland as it is utterly devoid of character and it’s a perfect example of a studio being completely ignorant of what makes a particular property work.
Instead of going for a a timeless, Raiders Of The Lost Ark tone, director Carl Schenkel opts to have the thing shot and edited like a 90s Pepsi Max commercial in a vain attempt to get kids interested in Tarzan by bashing them around the head with horrible CGI, incomprehensible exposition and virtually no characterization whatsoever for our frequently shirtless lead. To be fair, with his long hair, chiseled physique and a jaw so square you could use it to hammer molten steel, Starship Trooper’s Casper Van Dien certainly looks the part, but this Tarzan feels like his reintegration into civilised society has caused something of a charisma by-pass. Plus, at no point does he say “Come on you apes, you wanna live forever!” despite leading an actual army of apes in one scene – and that’s just careless. Playing the other half of adventuredoms greatest power couple is Jane March, which is a curious choice for a couple of reasons – one is that she has absolutely no spark with her co-star whatseover and the other is that the actress was more famous for cavorting with Bruce Willis’ flaccid winkie in a hot tub in the 1994 thriller, Color Of Night than sharp-shooting her way through a cheap-ass family film. In fact, even though Steven Waddington’s dastardly rotter is strictly a vanilla brand of villainy, he and his many, expendable henchmen have far more chemistry that the couple they’re hunting.
However, possibly the worst sin that Tarzan And The Lost City is guilt of is that Tarzan is that once to take a slightly closer look at what passes as a plot, you’ll plainly see that it’s muscled hero is actually surplus to requirements and aside from saving a few animals and rescuing his toothy bride-to-be, he actually has no effect on the story whatsoever – especially when it’s finally revealed that the prize for Ravens’ efforts is an agonizing death that feels uncomfortably similar to Cate Blanchett’s demise in the fourth Indiana Jones movie, which gives us just more reason to hate that unnecessary addition, I suppose…
When Tarzan isn’t having a single, solitary effect on the outcome of his own movie, he’s succumbing to random snake bites that Johnny Weissmuller or Gordon Scott probably would have laughed off in about six minutes or so and it’s strange that this attempt to resurrect one of the most famous heroes in history would make him as about effective as a red shirt from Star Trek.
Boring, ugly and made completely without vision, if the Disney version hadn’t surfaced to restore some respect to Tarzan’s name, he might have remained in the darkest parts of the jungle for good.
🌟
We Have Issues 