The Lost City review: Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum revive a near-dead genre

This review is a result of SXSW 2022, where Polygon sent journalists to examine the next wave.

For a reason, the adventure-romance genre is timeless. At its best, it offers exotic, remote locations that don’t often show up in movies, a beautiful couple with good chemistry, and a compelling adventure with danger, a love story, and usually a solid sense of humor. After 1951’s The African Queen set the standard for adventure-romances by uniting its era’s biggest stars on a high-stakes trip, and 1984’s The Stone of RomancingMany filmmakers tried to recreate the exact same idea and made a blockbuster. But they’ve found it surprisingly difficult to nail well.

The plot of The Lost CityThis makes it seem remarkably similar The Stone of Romancing, it’s actually most successful as a successor to The MummyThe film “The Adventure-Romance Genre” was a breakthrough in comedy and inspired many others to do the same. The Lost City doesn’t have the most exciting or novel plot, and it doesn’t push action filmmaking forward. But it does feature two of the moment’s greatest movie stars coming in at the top of their rom-com game, and mixing adventure and love. Aaron Nee and Adam Nee are filmmaking brothers.Romantic Last, Band of RobbersThey avoid the common stereotypes that these films fall into and remind the viewers that Channing Tatum makes a great himbo and Sandra Bullock makes a good rom-com queen.

Paramount Pictures – Photo

Bullock stars as Loretta Sage, a former archeologist who has discovered that people aren’t really interested in books about lost civilizations, but they will certainly read a romance novel featuring a hot adventurer going to faraway places. She’s channeled her knowledge into writing those novels, but after years of filling books with the same double-entendre jokes comparing lava flowing down a volcano to different fluids flowing down her fictional hero’s “volcano,” she’s become bitter and dissatisfied — especially over her sweet but dimwitted cover model Alan (Tatum), who seems to think he really is the Fabio-inspired star of her books.

Loretta, after several bestsellers, wants to quit writing novels. Even if it means she has to cancel her book tour. She doesn’t much care about derailing it, since everyone seems to be there just to see Alan shirtless, not to hear about a book. But Loretta can’t drop her career so easily, because she gets abducted by Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe), a rich guy who really wants her to know both that “Abigail” is a gender-neutral name, that the lost city from Loretta’s new book is real, and that it’s hiding an immense treasure. She is asked to help him translate ancient writings and find the treasure before the volcano buries it all. He will be able to use his discovery to get an advantage over his older brother.

This is not a hidden repeat. The Stone of RomancingA novelist is entangled in a treasure hunt through the Latin American jungle. The cast is however, a surprise. The Lost CityMake your mark. Bullock channels her Miss Congeniality comedic chops for a slapstick performance that shows she isn’t afraid of looking silly. Tatum shows why he’s one of this decade’s biggest movie stars: He excels at exploiting his looks and charisma for comedy. It’s worth watching the movie just to see him utterly fail at being an action hero, for instance when Loretta throws him a gun, and he ducks instead of catching it.

Then there’s the scene-stealing supporting cast, like Brad Pitt channeling his cool, carefree character from Hollywood: Once Upon a TimeHe is an action-adventure heroine with magical hair. Radcliffe’s performance is so convincing that it feels as if he took a dose of Adderall before each scene.

Paramount Pictures – Photo

There’s no question that the Nee brothers and their screenwriting partners Oren Uziel (of the 2021 Mortal Kombat(reboot) and Dana Fox (“a writer on”) Cruella) consider the movie’s laughs more important than its big stunts. Take some cues. The Mummy, they’ve clearly decided that they have a winning combination in a big, dumb action hero who looks just as cool beating up a bad guy as he does falling off a motorcycle like a doofus. And placing him next to a capable, smart woman who doesn’t really need saving can create some sparkling chemistry. This movie has had so much hot, steamy chemistry since Rachel Weisz and Brendan Fraser. The Lost City You get lots of mileage from putting Bullock or Tatum in funny but awkward situations like when she pulls his butt.

Like this treasure-hunting adventure movie Jungle CruiseNational Treasure: Or the most recent Uncharted, The Lost City It hits all the right notes. Your standard puzzle solving, codexes and crawling through narrow cave openings are just a few of its many features. But thankfully, the creators don’t try to cram in elaborate mechanisms that are hundreds of years old, yet have never been found before, like UnchartedDoes. They also don’t go the Indiana Jones Route, featuring artifacts which are truly magical.

Instead they present a solid, well-written road map for a presumed treasure. This is just blown out of proportion to unsuspecting white folks who hope that there will be a great El Dorado-esque hidden gem at the conclusion of their journey. A big problem with adventure films like this is that they focus on stereotypes and on exoticizing other cultures until they’re unrecognizable. The Lost CityThe local community is treated with respect and the humor between the leads of their comedy troupe, which largely ignores the history surrounding the treasure. When Loretta and Alan arrive at a local town, there’s no special local festival with unusual traditions, no grand welcome for the white foreigners — just a town square where people hang out on a Saturday evening.

But while the filmmakers try to mitigate their use of a Latin American island as an exotic setting by having one of the henchmen be a local with a connection to the culture and the treasure, he’s somewhat left behind by the plot. The plot is a bit confusing. Lost City does include one unfortunate stereotype: a sex-crazed Latin-lover character, who’s played for laughs without adding anything to the story.

The team behind this project is also able to do so in other ways. The Lost City isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel on the adventure-romance trope, so much as they’re trying to slightly update and revive a subgenre that’s faded into the background of cinema, along with theatrical rom-coms and big ensemble comedy movies. The Lost CityIs capable of stepping into the void to take advantage the ways films such as The Mummy have become less common, but it isn’t so striking or memorable that it’s likely to usher in a new era of treasure-hunting capers. Still, Bullock and Tatum’s chemistry is a reminder of why this type of film used to occupy as much space as it did in theaters. It’s an old-school kind of screwball comedy, seemingly designed to ask a single question: Are filmgoers ready and excited for another Mummy yet?

The Lost CityThis film opens in theatres March 24,