The Lost City

Here we have yet another example of the unwillingness of contemporary filmmakers and studios to make a romantic comedy, romantic adventure, or romantic caper unless it can be relentlessly self-mocking and dumbed down to the point that the target viewer can spend much of the running time texting or chatting with their BFFs or ducking out to grab more wine, without missing a thing. At least the actors in The Lost City all seem to have fun playing their one-dimensional characters, though not all of that fun carries over to the audience. The always reliable Sandra Bullock brings her mildly disgruntled charm to Loretta Sage, a romance novelist who specializes in historical adventure stories. Channing Tatum spreads the dumb-hunk shtick on too thick as Alan Caprison, the male model whose handsome face and ripped abs grace most of Loretta's paperback covers. While Daniel Radcliffe is unbearably unfunny as Abigail Fairfax, an eccentric billionaire bent on finding an ancient treasure.

Movies like this serve only to remind us how difficult it is to write an actual comedy that gets laughs by creating sharp, relatable characters and putting them in unexpected situations. It's so much easier to just drop caricatures into derivative scenarios and point out how silly it all is. The manufactured nature of this picture isn't helped by the fact that everything looks so artificial. I have no idea how much of this movie was shot in an actual jungle and how much was shot against a greenscreen. I only know it ALL looks like greenscreen, and every actor looks as if they just stepped out of a make-up room at all times. Remember how sweaty, muddy, and disheveled Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas looked in Romancing the Stone (1984) and how real that jungle felt? That's part of why that film is so effective.

Since this movie borrows its basic premise and a few key beats from that jewel in the crown of romantic adventure pictures, it invites inevitable comparison. But rather than harkening back to an era when movies like this were sincere, inventive, and endlessly rewatchable, The Lost City doesn't even measure up to the serviceably entertaining Six Days Seven Nights from 1998. Instead, I felt like I had been forced to sit through Disney's tedious Jungle Cruise movie from the previous year again, only this time with a couple of actual chuckles.