The Lost City

The Lost City is a romantic comedy-adventure that gets most of its success from the undeniable chemistry of Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum.  Whenever they're sharing the screen (which luckily is for a majority of it), the movie gets some huge laughs.  Even if the adventure they go on is not as memorable as one might hope, they are both more than enough to make this worth watching.

The film owes an obvious debt to 1984's Romancing the Stone, which followed a similar plot of a romance novelist being dragged into an Indiana Jones-style jungle adventure.  And yet, the lead performances here and their numerous one liners are able to help this one stand out from its inspiration.  Bullock has the role of the author here, Loretta Sage, who is best known for writing a series of romantic adventure stories centered around a chiseled hero named Dash McMahon.  Loretta has always been inspired by her actual love of adventure, as well as her knowledge of ancient cultures, which was fueled by the love for her husband, who was an archeologist.  But, after her husband has passed, Loretta has been dry on ideas, and her latest Dash adventure is not going as planned, despite the pressures by her publicist Beth (Da'Vine Joy Randolph).

On the press tour for her recent book, we are introduced to Loretta's dim-witted but well-meaning cover model, Alan Caprison (Channing Tatum), who has been the physical embodiment of Dash on the cover of all of her books, but in real life, seems to confuse the image of the character with who he is in reality.  Alan only wants to prove to Loretta that he's more than just a pretty face to grace her stories, and sees his chance to be a real-life hero when Loretta is kidnapped by an eccentric millionaire named Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe), who believes that the Lost City Loretta writes about in her Dash stories is real, and that she has information that can lead him to its treasure.  The two quickly become lost in the jungle as they try to stay ahead of Abigail's forces, and will have to rely on each other and their limited survival skills.

The Lost City belongs entirely to Bullock and Tatum, who are obviously having a blast playing off of each other here, and deliver quite a few laugh out loud moments.  Tatum, in particular, gets to once again show off his strong comedic skill playing a guy who means well, but would probably get lost on his way to his own mailbox, let alone a jungle.  Bullock, despite having the "straight man" role of the two, gets more than her share of laughs with her remarks about the adventure they are on, or when she points out Alan's lack of common sense. (When he describes her as a "human mummy", she has to remind him that mummies are human.) There's also a cameo from Brad Pitt that sadly got ruined in the trailers, and probably should have been kept secret.  Regardless, he's hilarious as well for the part of the story he's in as a Navy Seal-turned-CIA Agent who gets wrapped up in their adventure, and it's a shame the movie didn't use him more, as he could have made a funny movie an even better one.

It's when the screenplay has to focus on villain or the adventure itself that the movie loses a bit of energy.  Radcliffe simply lacks the vile hatred that the character needs, and kind of comes across as a geek pretending to be threatening.  He never develops into the kind of villain a story like this needs, and it's a shame that we never get an opposing force as strong as the heroes.  A subplot concerning Loretta's publicist going on her own mission to find the missing author is also largely unnecessary, and probably could have been trimmed with little consequence.  This is a movie with two great lead characters with wonderful comic dialogue between them, but the story and characters that surround them are not quite up to their level.  You almost want to uproot the two lead performances, and place them in a more worthy project.  Don't change anything about the heroes, or what they say to each other.  Just strengthen the film they're in.

Maybe the leads got to improvise a lot of their material, and that's why it's so much better than the rest of the film.  Whatever the case, they and the stuff concerning Pitt's character are the reason to watch The Lost City.  If everything was on the same level, we would have had a truly great comedy, instead of a movie that is very funny most of the time, and pleasant the rest.

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