#MovieReview: A big-screen adventure romance of old [Watch]

The Lost City is an easy to digest and enjoyable throwback to the adventure-romcoms of the 1980s.

Walking a high-wire line of electricity from the first frame, City manages for the most part to keep up with its own frantic pace.

Anchored by a charming Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, the movie never reaches true highs, but you will not be looking at your watch.

There are a few genres that seem to no longer exist, from tentpole comedies, erotic thrillers and mid-budget adult dramas, to the adventure movies of Indiana Jones and Romancing the Stone ilk.

These were reliably likable productions throughout the box office boom in the 1980s but have been overhauled by superheroes and straight-to-streaming common-denominator schlock.

What a pleasure it is to see a movie that tries to capture the bygone magic, by putting movie stars in interesting situations and locations and turning the camera on.

Sure, it is not perfect and much of the humour falls a little flat, but there is nothing cynical about City in the vein of Red Notice or Uncharted where social media and marketing teams dictated the content.

Mild spoilers to follow:
Bullock plays Loretta Sage, a romance novelist secretly hoping for a little of the content from her books to leak into her own life.

Tatum is Alan Caprison, an airheaded cover-model stereotype, who joins Sage on a promotional tour for her most recent book.

There are few other actors who play dumb as well as Tatum, as he did in the 21 Jump Street series, and his charmingly unafraid-to-look-silly performance is a big reason for the movie’s success.

You will root for this unlikely duo as they flit through unlikely set pieces and situations, searching for a kind of mutual connection.

This will hopefully make a good return on investment and compete against existing intellectual-property projects in the Marvel model.

That is not to say that Marvel does not have a place, but rather that both can exist in a big screen format, rather than being produced for viewing on your iPhone.

This is the kind film that will be a pleasant surprise when trawling DSTV on a lazy Sunday in a few years’ time.

Rated 13 for scenes of violence and partial nudity.
3.5/5.