Lost City Review: Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum revive the near-dead genre

This review comes from the 2022 SXSW media show, where Polygon sent writers to look at the next wave of upcoming releases.

The adventure-romance genre has stood the test of time for a reason. At its best, it offers exotic, remote locations that don’t usually appear in movies, a beautiful couple with good chemistry and a gripping adventure with danger, a love story and usually a sense of humour. After 1951 Queen of Africa set the standard for adventure-romance by uniting the biggest stars of its era in one highly profitable ride, and the 1984s Romantic stone To stack the same concept into an audience-pleasing blockbuster, many filmmakers have attempted to recreate this formula. But they find it very difficult to do a good manicure.

While the plot of Lost City make it sound similar to Romantic stoneit’s actually the most successful as a successor Mummiesa film that finds comedy in the adventure-romance genre and inspires many insurmountable competitors. Lost City It doesn’t have the most compelling or novel storyline and it doesn’t push action moviemaking forward. But it features two of the greatest movie stars of the moment at the top of their rom-com game, mixing adventure and love. Filmmaking Brothers Aaron and Adam Nee (The ultimate romance, Band of Robbers) avoids many of the stereotypes that these movies often fall into, and along the way, they remind viewers that Channing Tatum is the perfect guy, and Sandra Bullock is a longtime rom-com queen.

Photo: Paramount Pictures

Bullock plays Loretta Sage, a former archaeologist who discovers that people aren’t really interested in books about lost civilizations, but they’re sure to read a romance novel that tells about a hot adventurer going to faraway places. She channeled her knowledge to write those novels, but after years of filling the books with the same two-person jokes, comparing lava flowing down volcanoes to other liquids As each other flows down the “volcano” of her fictional hero, she becomes bitter and displeased – especially because of her sweetness but the cover model Alan (Tatum), who seems to like thinking he’s really the Fabio-inspired star of her books.

After a series of bestsellers, Loretta wants nothing more than to stop writing novels, even if that means destroying her new book tour before it even begins. She doesn’t care much about derailment, as people seem to go there just to see Alan topless, not to hear about a book. But Loretta can’t give up her career so easily, because she’s kidnapped by Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe), a rich guy who really wants her to know both that “Abigail” is one The name doesn’t discriminate, that the city lost from Loretta the new book is real, and that it holds a huge treasure. He wants her to translate some ancient texts and help him protect the treasure before a volcanic eruption consumes it all. If he can use the discovery to ultimately lift his more successful brother, all the better.

Well, the story is an undisguised repetition of Romantic stone, with a novelist caught up in a treasure hunt in the jungles of Latin America. But the cast does Lost City Highlights. Bullock her channel Miss Congeniality humor for a comedic performance that shows she’s not afraid of looking silly. Tatum shows why he’s one of the biggest movie stars of this decade: He excels at harnessing his looks and charisma for comedy. It’s worth watching the movie only to see him completely fail at being an action hero, such as when Loretta throws him a gun, and he crouched down instead of catching it.

Then there’s the scene-stealing supporting cast, as Brad Pitt delivers his cool, carefree character from Once upon a time in Hollywood to play the role of a real action adventure hero with magic hair. And of course, a good adventure movie needs a good villain, and Radcliffe welcomes the return of blockbusters with a performance that looks like he bumped Adderall in the bathroom before every scene. .

Photo: Paramount Pictures

There is no doubt that the Nee brothers and their screenwriter partner Oren Uziel (of 2021) Mortal Kombat reboot) and Dana Fox (a writer on Cruella) considers the film’s laughter more important than its big stunts. Take some signal from Mummies, they’ve clearly decided that they have a winning combination in a big, dumb action hero who looks just as good beating a badass as he does falling off a motorcycle like a idiot. And putting him next to a woman who’s capable, smart, and not exactly frugal can create some sparkly chemistry. Not since Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz have a movie like this that exudes so much hot chemistry. Lost City gets a lot of benefit from placing Bullock and Tatum in awkward but funny situations, like when she has to pull leeches out of his ass.

Is a treasure hunt adventure movie, like Jungle CruiseNational treasures, or recently Not detected yet, Lost City get to the usual notes: solving your standard puzzles, your codex, your crawling through very narrow crevices, etc. But fortunately, the creators aren’t trying to cram in mechanics. complex hundreds of years old, never found before, like Not detected yet do. They don’t go either Indiana Jones route, with truly magical artifacts.

Instead, they present a clever and well-grounded road map to a treasure believed to have been simply inflated by unsuspecting whites who expect a great secret of El Dorado-esque at the end of the journey. A big problem with adventure movies like this is that they focus on stereotypes and the importation of other cultures until they are unrecognizable. Lost City sidesteps the problem by largely ignoring the lore surrounding the treasure in favor of humorous hijinks among its clues, and by treating the locals with care. When Loretta and Alan arrived in a local town, there was no particular local festival with unusual traditions, no grand welcome for white foreigners – just a town square where everyone Saturday night outers.

But while the filmmakers try to minimize the use of a Latin American island as an exotic backdrop by having one of his minions be a local with a connection to culture and treasures, he We are somewhat left behind by the plot. And The Lost City does not include an unfortunate stereotype: a Latino sexist character who is played for fun without adding anything to the story.

In one way and another, the group behind Lost City are not trying to reinvent the wheel on the adventure-romance genre, as they are trying to slightly update and revive a subgenre that has been lost in cinema, along with romantic comedies and great comedy. Lost City afford to step into the void and take advantage of movies like Mummies has become less popular, but it’s not so prominent or memorable as to potentially usher in a new era of treasure hunters. However, Bullock and Tatum’s chemistry is a reminder of why this type of film used to take up as much space as it did in theaters. It’s an old-school type of comedy, seemingly designed to ask a single question: Are moviegoers ready and excited for another movie? Mummies not yet?

Lost City in theaters on March 24.