The Eighties were many things – Hypercolor T-shirts, big hair and shoulder pads – but they were also the era of wildly, escapist blockbusters like Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile, two films which took us on grandly silly adventures, throwing in some romance, derring-do and a healthy slice of boat-borne happy-ever-after.
Cinema, and by extension life, has, by and large, become a lot more serious since then but one thing clearly remains – we want to be taken far away from the everyday and live vicariously through the crazy antics of people who find themselves in less than ideal circumstances not of their own making.
Cue romance novelist Loretta Sage (Sandra Bullock, who also co-produced the film), a woman mired in grief from the untimely loss of her hunky archaeologist husband, who has spent five years trapped in her home – a rather lovely home by the way where bubble baths and champagne are the order of the day – and unable to write the sorts of pulpy Indiana Jones-meets-rom-com novels that have made her a household name.
She might have lost her romance writing mojo but her publisher Beth Hatten (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) most certainly has not, and under pressure from her friend/business dictator to finish her latest tome, Loretta dashes off a half-arsed ending, the inner workings of which play out in a highly amusing opening scene which takes us deep into an admittedly frustrated writer’s process, which gets the novel to bookstores but doesn’t do much for Loretta’s reviews.
Beth cares not; all she wants is for Loretta, with handsome, possibly dumb-as-a-post cover novel Alan Caprison (Channing Tatum) along for the often shirtless ride, to embark on a book tour that will restore her to prominence and push up sales.
The book by the way is The Lost City of D, a frothy tale of the search for apparently very real “Crown of Fire” on a ruin-strewn Atlantic Island, a story underpinned by actual historical research carried out by Loretta and her husband, research which attracts the attention of smooth-talking but quite unhinged, massive-chip-on-his-shoulder heir to a publishing family fortune Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe, who excels rather manically in another oddball role) who wants the treasure for himself.
So, he kidnaps Loretta, purple sequinned jumpsuit and all – the jumpsuit and heels are Beth’s idea and they are wholly unsuited for clumping through the jungle but then that’s half the suspending belief on an industrial scale fun, isn’t it? – takes her to the island (which is rather lushly tropical for an Atlantic island to be fair) with Alan, then Beth in tow determined to rescue their friend from the clutches of a suit-wearing rich guy on an ego-boosting mission to get rich and famous.
They are joined by Brad Pitt in a gloriously hammed-up of a role as expert rescuer Jack Trainer, who’s very good looking (“My dad was a weatherman” as if that explains everything) and who vows to get Loretta back before dinner; Alan, however, who has a very real thing for Loretta and is far more emotionally in touch and bright than she’s ever given him credit for, wants to play a role in her retrieval and goes along, eventually becoming her companion in a madcap dash through the jungle.
While there isn’t as much treasure hunting as as you might expect, and The Lost City owes more than a small debt of gratitude to Romancing the Stone et. al, occasionally coming off as a mere photocopy of its ’80s predecessors, it is still a lot of very silly fun.
Much of that silliness and sense of the absurd, integral to a confected slice of escapist cinema such as this comes from the back-and-forth between Alan and Loretta who find themselves locked in nonsensically unimportant snarky conversations about what you can and can’t do with cake and his fitness to rescue her in the first place.
It’s a classic he loves her/is frustrated by her meets she hates him/might possibly like him if she doesn’t know it scenario and while The Lost City lags a little in an uncertain middle section which feels like a false ending that isn’t sure where to go next, what doesn’t flag is the sense of fizzy romantic fun between Loretta and Alan who are clearly meant for each other.
We all know that’s where they’re headed so not a single spoiler lost its sparkly life in the writing of this review, but even with that well-flagged ahead, The Lost City still manages to elicit a wild sense of immersive enjoyment, a metric ton of stress-busting laughs and the sheer pleasure of watching two people fall in love who don’t know they need each other until they’re on the run in an unlikely jungle from treasure hunting goons who want to know where that damn crown is.
They’re not the only ones.
Loretta, even though she won’t admit to it, largely because to do so means that her husband lives in some form and the pain of that never happening is more than she can bear, wouldn’t mind finding it too, although for all this want and need for ancient trinkets and baubles, The Lost City is far more interested in the chase than the actual end result, romantically and justice-satisfying though that is.
While it is a little too light and slight for its own good at times, relying too much on the chemistry of its two leads – Bullock does her awkward, emotionally shutdown schtick to perfection while Tatum is all boy-next-door vulnerability writ large – and not enough on a super strong narrative which doesn’t seem able at times to transcend its ’80s derivative inspirations, the film is still a belly laugh-inducing joy, folding you up in its tale of grief and loss, renewal and hope and some good old-fashioned romantic blockbuster treasure-hunting which makes you feel like love does indeed save the world.
In a world beset by pandemic, war and climate change, with zombies and alien invasion surely just over the horizon, The Lost City is a tonic for the weary soul, a fairy floss-level film of dubious substance which nevertheless offers up some sparklingly fun performances (Randolph nails the supporting role thing, as does Pitt in his self-deprecatory cameo), a wondrously escapist storyline, witty banter that fairly sings with antagonistic intent and latent love, and the reassurance that life might not always follow the script but that’s okay because where it leads might just be the best thing that happens to you, ripped shirts and all.