It's a sad opportunity missed that this movie is not a lot better than it is. Some of the production values are high - the costumes and locations all look great, but there are failures. This could have been not just a good movie, but a great movie if it had been given more space, some long lingering panoramas, time to fill out the characters. Instead it is edited so everything is too quick paced like a Disney movie that allows no depth at all.Van Dien makes a fair effort, though comes across more as a boy in a man's role. Jane March looks pretty, but adds nothing extra to the part. Overall, a watchable effort, but still a good way down the long list of apeman movies.

Casper Van Dien, the hot young actor who starred in Paul Verhoeven's hit, "Starship Troopers," is Tarzan, who, on the eve of the wedding to his beautiful fiancée, Jane (Jane March), is confronted by a vision of the destruction of his childhood home. Torn between staying in England with Jane and returning at once to Africa, Tarzan, Lord Greystoke, returns to his adopted home, where he squares off against European soldiers of fortune, led by the Oxford-educated Nigel Ravens (Steven Waddington), bent on discovering and looting the legendary and mythic city of Opar.When Jane decides to follow her fiancé Tarzan (Casper Van Dien) into dangerous territory, not only Tarzan must protect the city of Opar but must protect Jane also, while trying to stop Nigel Ravens and his men.

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.

At least someone, somewhere, involved in this disposable Ape Man entry bothered to read the famous Edgar Rice Burroughs books on which the character is based. What was done with that information, unfortunately, amounts to nothing. Tarzan (vacantly handsome Casper Van Dien) and Jane (nondescript Jane March) head back to the jungle homeland and encounter pillaging baddies led by Steven Waddington (used better as a more complex nasty in The Last of the Mohicans). Director Carl Schenkel's film gives Tarzan back his long-absent status as an articulate gentleman, and it contains elements of Burroughs's feverish imagination, but it dully ticks off the "adventures" without any thrilling sense of fun. Schenkel is so inattentive to detail that he would have us believe no one raises an eyebrow at the sight of a man morphing into a humongous cobra (not that the Xena-level effects help). It's blandly amusing watching Van Dien plug away ineptly at both his heroics and English accent, though this is ultimately an empty diversion for completest only.