The jungle books
The Lost City is about as close to being a direct remake of the 1984 Robert Zemeckis film Romancing the Stone as I can imagine somebody trying to get away with, without acquiring the rights to that film. I lead with this not because I plan to spend the rest of this review using that as a stick with which to beat up on The Lost City, but specifically because I don't: the cluster of writers involved in writing the screenplay (a clear-cut sign of a film that's been going from hand to hand for God knows how long; the team that finally brought it in for landing were brothers Aaron & Adam Nee, who also direct) have done a pretty decent job of giving this story its own distinct identity even within the ultra-specific subgenre of "miserable and lonely romance novelist ends up in a jungle living through a plot just like one of her own books as she and a hunky leading man race for a treasure ahead of a fortune hunter". And the ineffable particulars of the production have done even more so. But it's so clearly indebted to Romancing the Stone that the longer I avoided mentioning it, the more I'd feel like I has hiding something. So now I've mentioned it, and now we can move on to the movie itself.
And that movie itself focuses on Loretta Sage (Sandra Bullock), a novelist consumed with self-loathing. First, she clearly thinks she's better than the genre that pays her bills; she studied to be a historian or archaeologist, and while her tales of the daring explorer Angela having sexy adventures around the globe with smoldering Dash McMahon are full of details informed by real historical research, that's less about creating great historic literature than it is about keeping herself even a little bit entertained by the process of cranking out books. Second, Loretta's husband, also an archaeologist, has been dead for a while - years, in fact, but she took it hard enough to have shut down completely, and it has nearly killed her career, and the career of her publisher, Beth Hatten (Da'Vine Joy Randolph). Thus, with no small amount of passive-aggressive badgering, Beth has finally shoved Loretta into finishing The Lost City of D, and shoved her again onto a publicity tour where she can barely even pretend to be interested in selling a book, and won't pretend to enjoy the company of Alan Caprison (Channing Tatum), the thick-witted model who portrays Dash on the covers of Loretta's books. Alan, for his part, has a huge crush on Loretta, and he's terrible at hiding it, but she doesn't seem to notice; presumably, that would require more "give a shit" than she has right now.
The kickoff to the story proper comes when Loretta is kidnapped and brought before Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe), an incredibly wealthy man who has been hunting for the treasure of the lost city of D for some time now - yep, the city existed, and he's even found the Atlantic island where it was located. He's hoping to find the "Crown of Fire", which was the Macguffin in Loretta's novel, and that damned historical accuracy she's so proud of has demonstrated to Fairfax's satisfaction that she'll be able to help him find it. And just like that, she's on a plane, with Beth and Alan between them just barely combining for enough level-headed thinking to send hardass mercenary Jack Trainer (Brad Pitt) on her trail. And Alan joins him, because he has it in mind that if he can prove himself a fearless swashbuckling hero like the fictional Dash, Loretta will be impressed and fall in love with him. And the mere fact of his astonishing ability to do so much as parse multi-clause sentences will not convince him to just stay the fuck out of Jack's way.
Even that isn't really getting us to the point of The Lost City, which can be summed up simply, as: Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum pratfall their way through a jungle. This is as great an example as you'll find in these fallow days of a pure-bred Movie Star Picture, where every other consideration is secondary to the overriding question: is it pleasurable to watch these famous people do very little "acting" as such, but simply to radiate charisma and bonhomie as the allow the camera to gaze at them? In the case of The Lost City, it is very damn pleasurable indeed. I'm pretty certain that I wouldn't have been to predict in advance that Bullock and Tatum would have fantastic chemistry - or, sure, I probably would have, since Tatum has great chemistry with just about everyone he's ever shared a scene with, but this goes above and beyond. Neither of the stars is pushing even a little bit past their comfort zone: Bullock is riding along in the "smart and bossy and easily exasperated, but she also treats major crises more like petty annoyances so we never feel like she's a whiny blowhard" gear that's one of her standard moves, and Tatum is obviously just doing the "sexy idiot" thing that's pretty much his default if he's not being specifically tasked with doing something else. Can I explain why the combination of these two is such a miraculous "you got your chocolate in my peanut butter" reactions? Not really - having somebody as breezily oblivious to play off of as Tatum in full himbo mode gives Bullock a lot of opportunity to sigh and sputter and grouse, but that only explains why he's a good foil, and he's not just that, he's the romantic lead in what turns out to be an especially winning, affable romcom. I'm afraid we just have here an example The Magic of Hollywood, the strange and indefinable "it" that comes when things go perfectly right.
All that being said, The Lost City is much more of an amiable good-time hang-out with our sexy, goofy friends Sandra and Channing, much less a slam-dunk funny comedy. The Nees are good at keeping the film moving smoothly through its paces, and I very much admire how well they've staged this, and cinematographer Jonathan Sela have lit this, especially the night and dusk scenes, to make the physical sets feel like actual places where the actors are standing around. It's still a big-budget movie in the 2020s, so there's still ample digital effects work, but it's physically grounded in ways I've grown unaccustomed to seeing, and the practical vibe the film gives off does a lot to make its good-natured shrug of a narrative feel scrappy and humane rather than lazily disposable, in the fashion of so very many modern popcorn movies. It's very 1990s, in the very best of ways. But this can all be true without the directors also pushing the film to have any of the speed and precision that make for great comedy, and while it is very nice seeing the two leads laze about in tailor-made roles, that same niceness robs The Lost City of any energy or surprise. It's a film to smile at, not a film to laugh with.
Possibly the only real exception comes from Radcliffe's performance, and it's not hard to understand why: the former Harry Potter is still, more than a decade after leaving his career-making role, hunting for ways to test himself and prove he can do new things. In this case, he's hit the "unctuous and unbelievable posh English villain in an American genre film" stage of his career, one of the great milestones for any actor born in Great Britain. He's pretty delightful, too, playing Fairfax as a boundlessly optimistic enthusiast, transforming his whole face into a giant grin ringed by a beard, babbling with manic passion, and generally doing excellent work with the script's conceit that every scene we have with the character reveals one new and more horribly antisocial thing about his personality. It provides a nice hook for Radcliffe to build each scene on the last, escalating the character to a frantically upbeat derangement by the time it's over, and that energy, as much as any of the actual jokes, ends up being where the film's most unexpected rhythms are found, and thus its best humor.
Outside of Radcliffe, The Lost City is mostly just easygoing and charming. And there's nothing wrong with either of those adjectives, of course, especially in something this reliant on movie star personality to move it forward. It's not an immediate classic, though I can imagine it being one of those things that remains weirdly persistent in memory despite not being "special"; it's just good, inordinately solid, well-built high-concept Hollywood filmmaking at a time when that's feeling increasingly like an endangered subspecies.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
And that movie itself focuses on Loretta Sage (Sandra Bullock), a novelist consumed with self-loathing. First, she clearly thinks she's better than the genre that pays her bills; she studied to be a historian or archaeologist, and while her tales of the daring explorer Angela having sexy adventures around the globe with smoldering Dash McMahon are full of details informed by real historical research, that's less about creating great historic literature than it is about keeping herself even a little bit entertained by the process of cranking out books. Second, Loretta's husband, also an archaeologist, has been dead for a while - years, in fact, but she took it hard enough to have shut down completely, and it has nearly killed her career, and the career of her publisher, Beth Hatten (Da'Vine Joy Randolph). Thus, with no small amount of passive-aggressive badgering, Beth has finally shoved Loretta into finishing The Lost City of D, and shoved her again onto a publicity tour where she can barely even pretend to be interested in selling a book, and won't pretend to enjoy the company of Alan Caprison (Channing Tatum), the thick-witted model who portrays Dash on the covers of Loretta's books. Alan, for his part, has a huge crush on Loretta, and he's terrible at hiding it, but she doesn't seem to notice; presumably, that would require more "give a shit" than she has right now.
The kickoff to the story proper comes when Loretta is kidnapped and brought before Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe), an incredibly wealthy man who has been hunting for the treasure of the lost city of D for some time now - yep, the city existed, and he's even found the Atlantic island where it was located. He's hoping to find the "Crown of Fire", which was the Macguffin in Loretta's novel, and that damned historical accuracy she's so proud of has demonstrated to Fairfax's satisfaction that she'll be able to help him find it. And just like that, she's on a plane, with Beth and Alan between them just barely combining for enough level-headed thinking to send hardass mercenary Jack Trainer (Brad Pitt) on her trail. And Alan joins him, because he has it in mind that if he can prove himself a fearless swashbuckling hero like the fictional Dash, Loretta will be impressed and fall in love with him. And the mere fact of his astonishing ability to do so much as parse multi-clause sentences will not convince him to just stay the fuck out of Jack's way.
Even that isn't really getting us to the point of The Lost City, which can be summed up simply, as: Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum pratfall their way through a jungle. This is as great an example as you'll find in these fallow days of a pure-bred Movie Star Picture, where every other consideration is secondary to the overriding question: is it pleasurable to watch these famous people do very little "acting" as such, but simply to radiate charisma and bonhomie as the allow the camera to gaze at them? In the case of The Lost City, it is very damn pleasurable indeed. I'm pretty certain that I wouldn't have been to predict in advance that Bullock and Tatum would have fantastic chemistry - or, sure, I probably would have, since Tatum has great chemistry with just about everyone he's ever shared a scene with, but this goes above and beyond. Neither of the stars is pushing even a little bit past their comfort zone: Bullock is riding along in the "smart and bossy and easily exasperated, but she also treats major crises more like petty annoyances so we never feel like she's a whiny blowhard" gear that's one of her standard moves, and Tatum is obviously just doing the "sexy idiot" thing that's pretty much his default if he's not being specifically tasked with doing something else. Can I explain why the combination of these two is such a miraculous "you got your chocolate in my peanut butter" reactions? Not really - having somebody as breezily oblivious to play off of as Tatum in full himbo mode gives Bullock a lot of opportunity to sigh and sputter and grouse, but that only explains why he's a good foil, and he's not just that, he's the romantic lead in what turns out to be an especially winning, affable romcom. I'm afraid we just have here an example The Magic of Hollywood, the strange and indefinable "it" that comes when things go perfectly right.
All that being said, The Lost City is much more of an amiable good-time hang-out with our sexy, goofy friends Sandra and Channing, much less a slam-dunk funny comedy. The Nees are good at keeping the film moving smoothly through its paces, and I very much admire how well they've staged this, and cinematographer Jonathan Sela have lit this, especially the night and dusk scenes, to make the physical sets feel like actual places where the actors are standing around. It's still a big-budget movie in the 2020s, so there's still ample digital effects work, but it's physically grounded in ways I've grown unaccustomed to seeing, and the practical vibe the film gives off does a lot to make its good-natured shrug of a narrative feel scrappy and humane rather than lazily disposable, in the fashion of so very many modern popcorn movies. It's very 1990s, in the very best of ways. But this can all be true without the directors also pushing the film to have any of the speed and precision that make for great comedy, and while it is very nice seeing the two leads laze about in tailor-made roles, that same niceness robs The Lost City of any energy or surprise. It's a film to smile at, not a film to laugh with.
Possibly the only real exception comes from Radcliffe's performance, and it's not hard to understand why: the former Harry Potter is still, more than a decade after leaving his career-making role, hunting for ways to test himself and prove he can do new things. In this case, he's hit the "unctuous and unbelievable posh English villain in an American genre film" stage of his career, one of the great milestones for any actor born in Great Britain. He's pretty delightful, too, playing Fairfax as a boundlessly optimistic enthusiast, transforming his whole face into a giant grin ringed by a beard, babbling with manic passion, and generally doing excellent work with the script's conceit that every scene we have with the character reveals one new and more horribly antisocial thing about his personality. It provides a nice hook for Radcliffe to build each scene on the last, escalating the character to a frantically upbeat derangement by the time it's over, and that energy, as much as any of the actual jokes, ends up being where the film's most unexpected rhythms are found, and thus its best humor.
Outside of Radcliffe, The Lost City is mostly just easygoing and charming. And there's nothing wrong with either of those adjectives, of course, especially in something this reliant on movie star personality to move it forward. It's not an immediate classic, though I can imagine it being one of those things that remains weirdly persistent in memory despite not being "special"; it's just good, inordinately solid, well-built high-concept Hollywood filmmaking at a time when that's feeling increasingly like an endangered subspecies.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Categories: adventure, comedies, popcorn movies, romcoms
