“The Lost City” is a big mess — a big enough mess that it doesn’t even get credit forknowingit’s a mess — but it stars Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, so that helps. It doesn’t make it worth seeing, but it keeps the experience outside the realm of pain.
Yet in one way the casting actually hurts: When actors who are really, really good at comedy apply themselves to dialogue that is really, really weak, you feel the strain. You feel the outline of the joke that wasn’t there — and the vicarious embarrassment of a failed acrobatic turn that goes splat. String enough splat moments together, and you have a movie that could have been good, but isn’t.
The setup is fine. Bullock is Loretta, a romance novelist who has become reclusive since her husband’s death. On a tour for her latest book, one she doesn’t even like, she is paired with Alan (Tatum), a model who has appeared on the cover of all the books in her celebrated series. At this point, the Fabio-like model has more fans than Loretta, and Tatum is funny, tossing his (wigged) long blond hair and preening for his fans.
One gets the sense that if the story just found a way to staythere, on that tour, the movie would have found its way to something enjoyable. But then the plot kicks in. A spoiled and somewhat demented young scion of the Fairfax media empire (Daniel Radcliffe) — these days, every evil character is a fictional rendition of someone from the Murdoch family — approaches Loretta with a proposition. Because of her knowledge of ancient languages, he wants her help finding the buried treasure of some lost civilization.
这是一个合理的报价。他需要帮助translating clues to the treasure, and he’s willing to pay her anything she asks. But she says no, so he kidnaps her and brings her to the island anyway.
It would be missing the point of a movie like this to quibble too much about illogical turns of plot. But even in a goofy confection like “The Lost City,” it’s hard not to notice when characters consistently behave against their own best interests, seemingly to help the screenwriters perpetuate the story. Over and over — I’d describe this in detail, but it wouldn’t be worth reading — the characters are shoehorned into actions that don’t make sense and that undercut both the story and the comedy.
The movie has two bright spots. Brad Pitt makes a brief appearance as the man who can get them off the island. Bullock asks him how he happened to become so handsome and he answers, “My father was a weatherman.” Bullock and Tatum also have a funny moment, right after they accidentally force two bad guys on motorcycles to go off a cliff. In what plays like an ad lib, the two start finishing each other’s sentences, talking guiltily about how they didn’t really mean for that to happen. It’s a moment that shows that their timing is in perfect sync.
Such moments are rare. For most of the movie, the actors push, but they have nothing to push, and the problem extends throughout the cast. Da’Vine Joy Randolph, as Loretta’s publisher, appears in a series of scenes in which she’s struggling to find Loretta. Every scene is broad and forced in a comic direction, but Randolph isn’t given a funny line, not one. At one point, she even has a speech, but without a laugh in it.
Filmmakers can’t depend on funny actors to go out there cold and bring back laughs. They have to be given funny things to do.
K“The Lost City”:Action romantic comedy. Starring Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum. Directed by Aaron Nee and Adam Nee. (PG-13. 112 minutes.) In theaters starting Friday, March 25.