Unless you are a dog mom or a wine aunt, I don’t think you will be in the target audience for “The Lost City”. Even if you are in that target demographic, I don’t know how you would be able to follow the absolute mess known as “The Lost City”.
Any movie with more than two screenwriters is destined to be a disaster and when you have a movie with four screenwriters and two directors, you have to wonder who thought any of this was a good idea?
Too many cooks, too many subplots, and too many pointless secondary characters make this film nothing more than a complete mess of a narrative sandwich between a cheesy rom-com.
The movie begins with Sandra Bullock as Loretta Sage, a recluse middle-aged author who writes romance-adventure novels centered around a fictional hero named Dash McMahon, who is portrayed by cover model Alan Caprison (Channing Tatum). After a disastrous start to her book tour, Loretta is met by billionaire Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe) who believes that Loretta has based her books on actual historic research she did with her deceased archaeologist husband.
Fairfax believes that there is a treasure on a remote Atlantic island and wanted Loretta to help him find it. When Loretta declines, he kidnaps Loretta and takes her to the island. Alan, who is secretly in love with Loretta, witnesses her kidnapping and recruits ex-Navy SEAL Jack Trainer (Brad Pitt) to coordinate a rescue attempt. Jack and Alan try to bring Loretta back from the idea as her publisher begins to freak out about the state of her book deal.
Everyone in this movie does their best character shtick. Sandra Bullock is the sexy but nerdy lead. Channing Tatum is his typical sexy but stupid comedic character. Daniel Radcliffe will take anything that will make him forget about Harry Potter and Brad Pitt is there to sell the movie to middle aged women.
The first act of this movie is quite a mess, there are so many subplots introduced that it is difficult to narrow down exactly what the film is supposed to be. It’s not until roughly 30 minutes in that the plot becomes clear while at the same time becoming more convoluted. Attempting to combine an action-adventure with a romantic-comedy makes EVERYTHING diluted and none of the films gernes mesh well together.
On one hand, the film wants to be an action adventure but steering the film in that direction involves creating a far-fetched story about an ancient treasure that doesn’t fit the film. When the movie tries to be romantic it takes until the 2nd act for anyone to believe it questioning why didn’t the multiple screenwriters spend more time building Bullock and Tatum’s relationship. Then when the movie tries to be funny, the gags have been done before and weren’t particularly funny at the time.
“The Lost City” has just a bit of everything to justify its genre but can’t escape the strong smell of genericness reeking from its script.
1.5/5
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