A Giggle in the Jungle

A lot of movies will have you checking your watch; The Lost City creates a strong urge to check your calendar. As I soaked up the premise, I thought: Did I step through a time portal and wind up in 1986? When I exited the theater, would people be talking about Max Headroom, New Coke, and the Iran-Contra scandal?

But the throwback the film offers is to a perfectly serviceable formula that should not have been discarded: the opposites-attract rom-com adventure. The Lost City is a smoothly engineered crowd-pleaser with a few twists (including two huge surprises), lots of clever quips, and a wholly predictable structure. I’d like to see the movie succeed because I’d like to see studio movies break out of the superhero box in which they’ve gotten trapped and offer a broader range of options.

As with ’80s and ’90s movies, The Lost City starts with the presumption that if you take a high-concept premise, easily explainable in ten seconds, and attach to it big stars everybody loves, you can launch a hit movie — maybe even a hit franchise. Sandra Bullock is Loretta Sage, an intellectual who is slumming it as a romance novelist writing about hidden treasure and glistening mounds of man-flesh; Channing Tatum is the dimwit cover model, Alan, who goes on book tours with her and whose bare chest is a bigger attraction to the lady readers than her prose; and — wouldn’t you know it? — she gets kidnapped by a crazy billionaire played by Daniel Radcliffe. Radcliffe is very funny as the passive-aggressive, eager-to-please villain who is convinced that linguistically accurate details in her latest book can be teased out to provide a map to a real lost city, and Brad Pitt is even funnier in a small role as a soldier of fortune who is hired to find her in the jungle, doing a sort of parody of the ultra-capable débrouillard he played in Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood.

The movie has no problem with your noticing that it borrows heavily from 1984’s Romancing the Stone (and there’s an in-joke along these lines in the background of one shot), because if an idea works, it works. What you might think would be the most challenging obstacle — that its two stars are from different generations, Bullock being 16 years older than Tatum — proves to be no problem at all. Bullock appears to have been digitally de-aged to look about 34. Good for her: Not only can she stay this age forever, but next time she could co-star with Cary Grant or John Wayne. The technology is that good. All is proceeding as I foretold. It’s the faces, not the fireballs, that will prove to be the greatest triumph of the digital-effects revolution, and actresses in particular can look forward to much longer careers than was previously the norm (though this news will be worrying to future actresses hoping to break in and finding their paths blocked by older stars).

Bullock and Tatum make for a brilliant comedy duo, each of them proving as always that they are pros who are willing to go wherever the joke takes them (there’s a scene where she’s climbing a rock and he gives her a lift from beneath by shoving his head up under her bottom). Nimble direction by brothers Aaron and Adam Nee, who also co-wrote the script with three others, largely keeps things moving, although there are a few scenes that could have been trimmed. The cutaway bits in which Bullock’s publisher (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) also joins the chase to find Loretta are meant to be sassy fun, but really they just slow things down with irrelevant supporting characters. A movie that was ten minutes shorter would have been more effective. (But stay for a mid-credits scene that adds an important development.)

Tatum and Bullock are especially gratifying to see because both have made themselves scarce lately. (Tatum’s excellent February movie Dog was his first star turn since Logan Lucky five years ago; Bullock had starred in only two other movies made for theaters since 2013, and one of them was the disastrous Our Brand Is Crisis.) Tatum is as good a comic leading man as there is in movies today, and Bullock remains the most likeable leading lady of her generation. Together, they hit traditionalist beats despite the movie’s token feminist gestures (“Wait, I’m the damsel in distress?” Alan asks.) It turns out in the end that having a strong man around can be very useful to a woman in extremis. I don’t know whether shrill voices will complain about the “retrograde” way the movie suggests that a lady novelist needs a big, strong, protective man, but it’ll certainly be worth an ancillary laugh if so.