The Lost City, this week’s new adventure/comedy/romance starring Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum and directed by Aaron and Adam Nee, used to be called The Lost City of D. Paramount elected to remove the sexual innuendo from the title before promoting the film, leaving it with a much more forgettable name. This turned out to be appropriate, as The Lost City is a pretty forgettable movie. It’s not a disaster by any means — Bullock and Tatum make a fine comedic pair — but it’s the sort of comedy in which most of the best gags are in the trailer and not much else sticks. The Lost City is a base hit, a mildly funny and inoffensive date movie that will entertain you for two hours and then completely leave your head.
Stranger Than Fiction
Loretta Sage (Sandra Bullock) is the best-selling author of the popular Angela Lovemore series of adventure romance novels. She’s an academic whose scholarly writing never paid the bills, so she channels her expertise in history and archeology into work that she feels is beneath her. Since the death of her husband five years ago, Loretta has been a total hermit, but her publicist Beth (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) has arranged a comeback book tour to promote her latest work, The Lost City of D. But Loretta isn’t even the star of her own show, as her readers are more excited to meet Alan Caprison (Channing Tatum), the hunky, brainless model who portrays the romantic hero, Dash McMahon, on the covers of her novels. Tired of his buffoonery, Loretta announces that she’ll be killing off Dash in her next book, putting Alan out of a job.
Enter Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe), a billionaire who’s seeking the real-life treasure that’s the subject of Loretta’s latest novel. Since Loretta accurately translates a string of ancient glyphs from the real City of D in her book, Fairfax kidnaps her to work as his translator for the rest of his quest. Seeing an opportunity to prove himself worthy of Loretta’s love and respect, Alan races to her rescue, mostly making a fool of himself in the process. The bulk of the film follows Alan and Loretta on a slapstick adventure through the jungles of a (fictional) island in the Atlantic as they evade Fairfax’s goons and seek out the treasure themselves. Their survival depends on their becoming the kind of heroes Loretta has spent her career writing about.
Bullock and Tatum have decent comedic chemistry together, with Tatum as the benign childlike hulk who gets them into trouble and Bullock as the straight arrow who has to get them out of it. Both actors are playing directly to type and that’s exactly what The Lost City calls for. Bullock clings to her dignity through increasingly humiliating trials; Tatum balances a leading man’s confidence with middle schooler’s awkwardness and command of the English language. Da’Vine Joy Randolph (Dolemite is My Name) has a decent supporting turn as a business lady who doesn’t have time for anyone’s nonsense, though her subplot is mildly funny at best. Patti Harrison (Together Together) sneaks in a few laughs as Loretta’s aloof social media manager, but she gets very little screen time. It’s a bit more fun to see Daniel Radcliffe play a comedy villain, a super-rich failson who is scrambling for relevance after his younger brother inherits the family business. He’s not delivering anything spectacular either, but at least he’s stretching his persona a bit. Unsurprisingly, Brad Pitt steals his few scenes as Jack Trainer, a soldier of fortune who’s everything Alan wants to be but isn’t. Each actor understands the tone of the film, but also seems to agree that it’s not really worth breaking a sweat over this.
The Lost D of the City
The Lost City draws easy comparisons to the 1984 Robert Zemeckis film Romancing the Stone, in which a romance novelist played by Kathleen Turner embarks on a treasure hunt with a roguish adventurer for hire played by Michael Douglas. Each movie is very much of its time. Romancing the Stone is a steamy, sweaty comedy adventure that’s very much sold on the sex appeal of its two leads. (It’s also set in an unflattering Reagan-era caricature of Columbia.) For better and for worse, The Lost City is a much tamer film. It carefully navigates the sticky politics of hunting for a treasure buried by indigenous people on an island colonized by Europeans, though it also employs the very comic book cheat of taking place in a made-up setting without any real history to represent or misrepresent. Like a lot of post-Judd Apatow studio comedies, jokes are extended a bit past their welcome via crosstalk and improvisation, and sight gags are rarely left to stand on their own. Where Romancing the Stone was a riff on erotic romance novels, The Lost City is more of a parody, if a pretty toothless one. Anything potentially sexy is either embedded within or immediately followed by a joke. In the plainest example: You see Channing Tatum’s bare ass, but it’s covered in leeches. But even in its more sincere moments, there’s not much heat between Bullock and Tatum. Loretta Sage’s readers would be very disappointed.
The Lost City does a much better job leveraging Tatum’s awkward puppy dog cuteness than his famous Magic Mike body. While he looks the part of a bodice-ripping alpha male from a romance novel, Tatum’s character is actually a different kind of fantasy altogether. Alan is an unadulterated himbo, a muscle-bound sweetheart with nothing in his head but good intentions towards people in general and women in particular. He’s completely non-threatening, a model of respectful behavior towards his crush throughout their precarious ordeal. He’s sweet and thoughtful, but his best efforts are hampered by his lack of either common sense or intellect. In other words, he’s a made-to-order, unproblematic boy toy for the 2020s. A lot of the movie’s funniest moments comes from his poorly-considered attempts to do good, but in dramatic moments his stupidity suddenly evaporates and he becomes an articulate, emotionally mature adult. Tatum is good at playing both sides of Alan, but they don’t feel like the same character.
It’s harder to get a read on Sandra Bullock’s performance. The story finds Loretta Sage five years into a deep depression, so it’s appropriate that Bullock should play her as someone who would rather be taking a nap for most of the movie. This also plays to Bullock’s dramatic strengths (see her performance as a grief-stricken astronaut in Gravity), but The Lost City is too shallow a film to make much out of it. That’s not such a crime for a goofy comedy adventure, but it does mean that, in between moments of slapstick, Loretta’s lifelessness is boring rather than meaningful.
The Lost City is about as medium a film as you’re likely to see. The Nee brothers have set modest aims and only missed by a little. It’s best suited for watching in a theater that serves cocktails, on a short cross-country flight, or in the background while folding laundry or scrolling social media. And that’s okay! Sometimes you want to enjoy a light adventure that isn’t weighed down by heavy themes or dense mythology. That being said, Romancing the Stone is currently streaming on HBO Max.
