If you squint, you might recognise a slew of better films that the creators of “The Lost City” may have had in mind as they worked on developing Sandra Bullock’s latest ‘action, romantic comedy’. Certainly, the film is rarely romantic, only fleetingly comedic and its action set-pieces are underwhelming. But you can make out some faint glimmer of what it might be attempting. For a film with four credited script-writers and an additional fifth person with a “story by” credit, most of what “The Lost City” could or might be, is eclipsed by the aggressive nothingness of what it is – an incredibly tepid film experience.
A writer in her late-fifties finds herself thrust into an unlikely romance with a younger man. That’s actually the plot for Nancy Meyer’s “Something’s Gotta Give”, where Diane Keaton finds herself navigating potential romance with a younger Keanu Reeves and an older Jack Nicholson. But it did occur to me while watching, “The Lost City” where Sandra Bullock plays Loretta, a late-fifties writer who finds herself in an unlikely potential romance with a younger man (played by Channing Tatum) how different romance, or the illusion of it, looks like when a movie actually has something to say. And it’s anyone’s guess what, if anything, “The Lost City” has to say. The bones of the plot are straightforward enough – Loretta is a widow who writes romance novels and is on a book tour when she’s kidnapped by Abigail Fairfax, a nefarious billionaire looking for a lost city with an allegedly priceless treasure. Loretta’s historical research with her deceased archaeologist husband has Fairfax convinced she can help him locate the treasure. In an attempt to convince Loretta of his devotion, her cover model (Tatum as Alan) embarks on a rescue mission to the remote Atlantic Island. Chaos ensues, then adventure and then romance.
If that all sounds like a vaguely clumsy set-up for a film with so many writers, it’s not the only case of “The Lost City” feeling defined by a general noncommittal energy. It’s a perplexing tone for a film that carries a lot of weight. In a ‘post-pandemic’ world, the question of whether audiences will venture out to cinemas for anything beyond the spectacle of superhero fantasy is a big question. And the intentions of a mid-budget romantic comedy, led by a woman (Bullock also produces this) is a great idea. A world with more romantic comedies on the big-screen is a better world, especially ones that honour women over fifty. Yet, little of anything in “The Lost City” feels as exciting, or innovative or engaging as that potential might be.
Is it a radical point to say that a film must both be romantic and comedic before it’s allowed to market itself as a romantic comedy? Theoretically, it shouldn’t, but increasingly the films going by the romcom moniker seem dispossessed of either the ‘rom’ or the ‘com’ leaving us with interminable sludges that elicit an ambivalent “ummm” more than anything. This isn’t really the fault of Aaron and Adam Nee (who have co-directing duties, as well as co-script-writing duties). They’ve arrived at the party late in the game when the Hollywood romantic comedy has already been whittled down to tepid nothingness. And yet, it’s difficult not to feel vaguely resentful of its turgid inoffensiveness. It is, to its merit, rarely ever thoroughly bad.
There are too many actors before us who are fine enough, even when they’re coasting. The general charm of Bullock, Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe and (a very brief) Brad Pitt are fine. Da’Vine Joy Randolph, saddled with a grim Black Best Friend role, tries her utmost with a truly insubstantial role. But beyond a general idea for the film’s own metatextual considerations of what it means to write about romance, “The Lost City” feels indistinct at every turn. Even its central value, a woman in her fifties as a romantic subject, feels pointless when very little in this film suggests that Bullock is truly embodying a reclusive, older woman. One thinks of Katharine Hepburn becoming increasingly uninhibited in “The African Queen”, or of Diane Keaton allowing herself to want and be wanted in “Something’s Gotta Give”. There’s possibility, depths of possibility, in a woman who thought love had passed her recognising that it is within her grasp. But it would take a precise level of care and character specificity for us to be moved by any show of passion. And “The Lost City” is low on specificity, and even lower on passion.
One might imagine the appeal of Tatum and Bullock together – his scatter-brained bumbling hero shtick has its appeal against Bullock’s more taciturn Loretta. But the film has no idea of who these people are individually, or together. And that’s not even accounting for its weird idea of what the publication of romance novels in 2022 look like. I spent way too much time wincing at the general carelessness of each escalating plot point. Whenever a popcorn movie comes out and I find myself thinking too hard. I think, perhaps, I’m being bizarrely pedantic about a film that should just be fun, and then I think how in 1930s the height of romantic comedy, film excellence and actual box-office success were a string of actual valuable romcoms that would set the stage for so much great work. Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn waltzing while drunk on champagne, or a few decades later Rock Hudson and Doris Day sizzling as enemies to lovers in “Pillow Talk”, or the romance and comedy amidst the social realism when James Earl Jones and Diahann Carroll embrace in “Claudine”. The height of comedic specificity, or anything like heightened tension, in “The Lost City” comes with a shot of leeches on Channing Tatum’s butt-cheeks. Sure, there are worse uses of a very big screen. But really to what end? At every turn, “The Lost City” chooses the least compelling or entertaining road for these characters to take, and even worse for its approach to framing them. It’s not just the script giving them nothing, but a final climactic moment of our lovers observing an erupting volcano holds no grandeur or majesty; like the rest of the film it looks and feels synthetic. Two would-be lovers on an adventure in the forest could offer something aesthetically engaging. But not here. Shoddy aesthetics meet shoddy politics, when the film’s idea of engaging with the indigenous legend at its centre echoes a consistent absence of any sense of understanding indigeneity in any real way.
I refuse to believe that anyone anywhere is mustering up passion for this.
Where’s the chemistry? The drive? The needful romance that makes life that much more valuable? Even if one considers “The Lost City” as more concerned with something sedate, a widowed woman finding love again, the contours of its romance are so lacking. When the lovers kiss at the end, you can feel the film shrugging as if to say, ‘Sure, I guess,’ which just about sums up my reaction to it. Never truly egregious to be terrible, but devoid of passion or character it’s hard to muster up much of a response to the aggressively underwhelming hijinks at work here. If this is our last hope for the romantic comedy as a cinematic event, then we have little to look forward to.
