The Lost City review: A big screwball swing for old-school action-comedy
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Somewhere in the mists of time before IP and franchise, there used to be a lot more of a certain kind of sunny, modestly ambitious movie that might have been called a romp: blithe action comedies in which two pretty people fight and blunder and fall for each other, and maybe romance a few stones along the way.
Almost everything about The Lost City (in theaters March 25) feels familiar in that sense, and comforting, too: a cheerfully shambolic grab-bag of shenanigans and movie stars with enough screwball wit and self-awareness to drag it into 2022. It's also a fitting send-off for Sandra Bullock, who recently announced her retirement, or at least a furlough from acting, and was essentially forged in stuff like this. Here she's Loretta Sage, a woman who writes bestselling bodice-rippers she can barely stand; Channing Tatum is Dash, the genetically blessed himbo whose fame as the palomino-maned cover model for her novels have made the two of them synonymous, much to her chagrin.
Except his real name is actually Alan, and the hair, like his life skills, is largely an illusion. He's only ever really had to play the hero on embossed paperbacks, so when Loretta is plucked from a book-tour event by unknown assailants and kidnapped, he feels compelled to prove that he can be that guy in real life. And when her Apple Watch pings somewhere over the Atlantic, her panicked publicist, Beth (Da'vine Joy Randolph), agrees to let him go ahead, largely because he's the only one with anything resembling an action plan.
Kimberley French/Paramount (L-R) Brad Pitt, Sandra Bullock, and Channing Tatum star in 'The Lost City.'
That plan pretty much begins and ends with texting Jack Trainer (Brad Pitt), a freelance mercenary he met once at a meditation retreat. Jack is everything Alan isn't: combat expert, casual intellectual, man of substance and advanced sleeper holds. Thankfully, he also accepts crypto, and it doesn't take them long to track Loretta down on the remote tropical island where the black-sheep son of a media mogul called Abigail Fairfax ("It's a gender-neutral name!") has taken her in the hopes of using her knowledge of ancient cuneiforms to track down an ancient treasure known as the Crown of Fire.
In other words, it's all ridiculous, and everyone here, including directing duo Adam and Aaron Nee (Band of Robbers) knows it. But Fairfax is played by Daniel Radcliffe, who is clearly having more fun than most actors recently conscripted to represent today's favored screen bogeyman, the feckless tech-bro villain (See also: Free Guy, Old Guard, Venom, The Matrix Revolutions). His Abigail is a perfect twerp, the peevish flipside to Pitt's Most Interesting Man in the World shtick. Randolph's harried, brutally honest Beth and Patti Harrison, as a daffy social-media manager, also regularly manage to steal their scenes from the margins.
But nothing in Lost City would really hang together without its main pair, whose chemistry movies like this inevitably live or die on. She's a trademark Bullock heroine, forever vacillating between serene self-assurance and high anxiety; he's like a happy Labrador, winning hearts and minds while heedlessly crashing into things. Their rapport feels both meticulously market-tested and somehow gratifyingly natural, and strong enough too to withstand a careening, unabashedly cartoonish plot (penned by Horrible Bosses director Seth Gordon) whose into-the-sunset endgame is already guaranteed. They're just here to play with wigs and passports and pratfalls and for two breezy, anesthetizing hours, make the world outside disappear. Grade: B
Related content:
