The Lost City

Where mid-bud­get movies once greased the wheels of the Hol­ly­wood machine, today their stock is at an all-time low. A num­ber of fac­tors have con­tributed to this decline, includ­ing the rise of pres­tige TV, the pro­lif­er­a­tion of stream­ing plat­forms, and the fact that the box office has become monop­o­lised by a hand­ful of cor­po­ra­tions gripped by fran­chise fever. All of which makes The Lost City feel like a rare treat – a sexy, smart, self-aware stu­dio com­e­dy with an orig­i­nal premise and a bona fide A‑list cast that gets by on more than pre-exist­ing brand awareness.

Don’t call it a throw­back though. Despite bear­ing cer­tain sim­i­lar­i­ties to high-con­cept action-adven­ture roman­tic come­dies of yes­ter­year (name­ly Romanc­ing the Stone, The Jew­el of the Nile and Six Days, Sev­en Nights), this is a thor­ough­ly mod­ern romp. San­dra Bul­lock stars as Loret­ta Sage, pub­lic­i­ty-shy author of a for­mu­la­ic but huge­ly pop­u­lar adven­ture-romance nov­el series that cen­tres around a dash­ing explor­er in the Indi­ana Jones mould. On the eve of her new book tour, Loret­ta is kid­napped by a douchy bil­lion­aire called Abi­gail Fair­fax (Daniel Rad­cliffe) who is hunt­ing for trea­sure on a trop­i­cal island some­where in the Atlantic.

It tran­spires that Loretta’s nov­els are part­ly based on her late husband’s archae­o­log­i­cal research, mak­ing her the only per­son capa­ble of deci­pher­ing the clue that will lead Fair­fax to the price­less arte­fact. Alert­ed to her sud­den dis­ap­pear­ance, Loretta’s unflap­pable pub­li­cist Beth (Da’Vine Joy Ran­dolph) and hunky cov­er mod­el Alan (Chan­ning Tatum) hire a pre­pos­ter­ous­ly alpha ex-Navy SEAL named Jack Train­er (Brad Pitt, hav­ing an absolute blast) for a dar­ing res­cue mis­sion. With Beth assist­ing from the side­lines, Jack and Alan quick­ly track down Loret­ta – but at the cru­cial moment Jack goes MIA, leav­ing Alan and Loret­ta quite lit­er­al­ly up the creek.

From here on it’s unclear who is sup­posed to be sav­ing who. Direc­tors Aaron and Adam Née and screen­writ­ers Oren Uziel and Dana Fox nim­bly swerve a trad damsel-in-dis­tress nar­ra­tive by hav­ing Loret­ta fre­quent­ly bail Alan out of trou­ble, as when she de-leech­es his naked but­tocks after the pair evade their pur­suers down­stream. They strike a good bal­ance between tongue-in-cheek humour and clas­sic screen romance, trad­ing on Bul­lock and Tatum’s nat­ur­al charis­ma and com­ic tim­ing. No dis­re­spect to The Rock, but it’s refresh­ing to watch a main­stream action-com­e­dy with a lead­ing man who has gen­uine sex appeal; paired, no less, with a lead­ing woman 16 years his senior. (Take that, age gap discourse!)

Buried trea­sure notwith­stand­ing, the biggest mys­tery here is why Para­mount decid­ed to drop ​‘of D’ from the title: Not only is ​‘The Lost City of D’ more intrigu­ing and play­ful, it’s actu­al­ly the name of Loretta’s lat­est nov­el, which is referred to by its full, unam­bigu­ous title through­out. Did the po-faced pro­duc­ers fear this pun would fly over the heads of those not au fait with the work of Seri­ous Film­mak­er James Gray? Or did they sim­ply deem the wink-wink con­no­ta­tions of the guilty ini­tial to be too risqué? Let’s hope the joke isn’t ulti­mate­ly on them, because we need more mid-bud­get movies like this.