THE LOST CITY
★★★ OUT NOW CERT TBC / 112 MINS DIRECTORS Adam Nee, Aaron Nee CAST Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe, Da’vine Joy Randolph, Brad Pitt
PLOT When grieving romance novelist Loretta (Bullock) is kidnapped by an eccentric billionaire (Radcliffe), her cover model Alan (Tatum) takes off after her in an attempt to prove that he’s more than just a pretty face. Unfortunately for their chances of survival, that face might really be all they have.
DEATH CANNOT STOP true love; it can only delay it for a while. Or so The Princess Bride taught us. Sure enough, the much bally-hooed death of the big-screen romcom is beginning to look more like a hiatus, because here we are in 2022 with a crowd-pleasing, star-led romance in an exotic location. If much of directors Adam and Aaron Nee’s plot feels like a throwback to an earlier era, and in particular to Romancing The Stone, the humour here is entirely up-to-date and immensely fun.
The familiar bits first: Sandra Bullock steps into Kathleen Turner’s shoes as a successful romance novelist whose personal life is a mess. But unlike Joan Wilder, Bullock’s Loretta is grieving a lost husband, and seems irritable at the success of her own books. In place of Michael Douglas’ tough jungle guide we have Channing Tatum’s gentle cover model Alan, who’s nursing both a crush on and a grudge against Loretta, the latter for her refusal to take her own books seriously. However, when she’s kidnapped by a media billionaire’s son, Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe), Alan swings ineffectually into action, and soon our two heroes are lost in the jungle of a small island, bickering and perhaps bonding as they try to find safety.
None of this is particularly new, of course. Bullock has played the wary, uptight overachiever before; Tatum’s given us previous variations on witless-yet-beautiful; even a bit with leeches has been done before. But the film finds nuance to season the archetypes. There’s more than lip service paid to Loretta’s grief and her dashed dreams of serious scholarship, and while she’s not immune to Alan’s looks, you can see why he wouldn’t be on her radar. Tatum, meanwhile, gamely plays the bimbo role, but manages to inject just enough edge to suggest that Alan’s brain is merely underutilised and not entirely absent.
With the stars carrying the film along, the Nees can add emotion and humour in the detail. They mine laughs from Alan’s phone contacts and Fairfax’s cheese board, while costume designer Marlene Stewart puts Bullock in a fuschia-coloured sequinned jumpsuit that plays well against the otherwise standard jungle aesthetics. Brad Pitt’s hyper-capable survival trainer, Jack Trainer, is an awe-inspiring embodiment of the romance novel archetype who threatens even the usually laid-back Alan, while Da’vine Joy Randolph does a lot with very little as Loretta’s editor. Radcliffe even comes close to saying something true about the entitlement and self-righteousness of the super-wealthy as a black-sheep billionaire.
Really, though, you have to want to find deeper meanings here. This movie is like its star’s jumpsuit: sparkly, gorgeous and entirely frivolous. It coasts by on charisma and comedic talent, on dancing and daring, on stunning locations (the Dominican jungle) and stakes that are high enough to hold the attention and not a millimetre higher. You will predict almost every beat before it arrives and welcome its arrival anyway, because the formula works. The romcom is dead; long live the romcom.