Criticism of ‘The Lost City’, the crazy adventure of Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum

When Arnold Schwarzenegger took over from The Rock in the increasingly vindictive and influential ‘The Amazon Treasure’, By Peter Berg, many of us believed that the adventure action genre (or vice versa) was entering a new stage that would steel more the unbelieving layer of insubstantial eighties joy that it drank before from the classics than from renovating currents in comics or in literature. It wasn’t bad, of course.

The 80s are the decade of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, ‘The Goonies’ and that ‘After the Green Heart’ by Robert Zemeckis that ‘The lost City’ rewrites, not on a typewriter, but on a state-of-the-art computer with enough memory to quote Zemeckis’s film, Indiana Jones and the jovial nonchalance Amblin. Also Stephen Sommers of ‘The Mummy’ and sequels, who were excellent and popcorn, but ignoring any capacity for renewal of the genre. Surely it was not his intention or bother that in the accelerated, comic and parodic without falling into the parody film of the brothers Aaron and Adam Nee. Why renew when the ingredients of a lifetime continue to work with minimal variations?

‘The Lost City’ arrives just when the public, away from theaters due to pandemics and the new way of consuming cinema at home, has found in the adventure (‘Jungle Cruise’, ‘Uncharted’…) the way to resuscitate what it meant to go to a room and let yourself go. ‘The lost city’ is carried away from minute one and never stops. gets carried away by an exotic trip full of clichés that don’t bother because the characters that move around there are even more so. It gets carried away by anything goes if it’s funny or if it allows directors to play with a video game and animation series language (we’re not very far from ‘DuckTales’, which is good) and a montage more focused on the hit of effect or brilliance for brilliance than for dramatic cohesion. He gets carried away by a script that is nothing more than the preliminaries of a joke, its execution and the dead time that we must fill with our laughter. He gets carried away by a leading couple who, no, are not Arnold Schwarzenegger and The Rock, or Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas; neither are the Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase of ‘Dangerous Game’. Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum (especially him in that epic and comic gayer way) do not stop reminding us of Gracita Morales and José Luis López Vázquez in the adventurous feature film that Mariano Ozores of the 60s and 70s never got to shoot.

It will not be the one who writes this who denies bread and (coarse) salt to the antics of Sandy and Channing, because they have amused me a lot, except that a tremendous Daniel Radcliffe or that appearance, with many private jokes, of Brad Pitt. I’ll keep waiting for a new wave of action and adventure films like the ones that ‘The Treasure of the Amazon’ seemed to herald, but for now ‘The Lost City’ is enough for me, more Dora the Explorer than the coming-out on the big screen of Dora the explorer (in search of another lost city).

For the popcorn public after the green heart in the shape of a jelly bean.

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DATA SHEET

Direction: Aaron Nee, Adam Nee Distribution: Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe, Brad Pitt Original title: Lost City Country: USA Year: 2022 Release date: 04-13-2022 Gender: Adventure Film script: Dana Fox, Oren Uziel, Adam Nee, Aaron Nee Duration: 120 minutes

Synopsis: The literary career of the brilliant and somewhat reclusive novelist Loretta Sage (Sandra Bullock) has revolved around romantic adventure novels that, set in exotic locations, star an attractive beau whose image is reproduced on all the covers, and that in real life it corresponds to Alan (Channing Tatum), a model who has focused his career on personifying the fictional adventurer.