Amazon.com video review:
One of those legendary missed opportunities, Greystoke: The Legend of
Tarzan, Lord of the Apes is a movie that should
have been great but wound up the victim of conflicting egos and
wrong-headed choices. Based on a screenplay by Robert Towne (who took
his name off it when he wasn't allowed to direct) and directed by Hugh
Hudson (riding high on the basis of Chariots of Fire), the film tried
to rethink the Tarzan legend of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and boy, did it
have to: By casting French-accented Christopher Lambert as Tarzan, the
filmmakers had to transform his white-hunter mentor Ian Holm into a
Frenchman to explain those inflections in Tarzan's monosyllabic
speech. The film has some amazing jungle footage and a truly touching
relationship
between Tarzan and the apes--but it gets pretty silly when Tarzan gets
to London and hooks up with Sir Ralph Richardson, as his grandfather.
-–Marshall Fine
