The Lost City: Not as much fun as it thinks it is

Well, this is about 50 per cent as much fun as it thinks itself to be. The good news – if that’s the phrase – is The Lost City believes no mere barrel of monkeys can compare. You would, the film argues, need a hogshead or a pipe cask of primates to rival its funness.

Just consider the good will being mined here. Sandra Bullock (whom even the dead adore) plays a romance novelist stranded in the jungle with a dim-witted Channing Tatum (as welcome a presence as pickle on cheese). Who wouldn’t like to see some redress for those hundreds of films in which an older male star repeatedly plucked a younger damsel from the jaws of a crocodile? Not only is Sandy a tad older than Channing, she really does – even if dressed in pink sequins for the first hour – get to be the centred grown-up to his manic pixie.

Sure, the film borrows shamelessly from Romancing the Stone, but that film was itself slip-streaming behind Raiders of the Lost Ark. Everything about The Lost City is yelling “fun, fun, fun!” in your lughole. You are being dared not to have a good time.

Well, without wishing to take the T-Bird away, that good will takes the project only so far. For reasons that are too implausible to explain, an evil profiteer (Daniel Radcliffe, no less) kidnaps Loretta Sage, Bullock’s irritated writer, and drags her to an island with a mind to uncovering mountains of treasure. Alan Caprison (Tatum), cover model for her books, recruits a private operative (is that Brad Pitt?) and heads to the rescue.

As you may have gathered from the lack of publicity, Pitt’s appearance is fleeting, but, making amiable fun of his core heroic persona, he extracts more laughs from those 10 minutes than Bullock and Tatum manage in the succeeding hour. This is not their fault. These are two charming actors who play off each other with manic enthusiasm. Alas, the screenplay is woefully short on screwball energy. Nor does it help that Radcliffe can’t bridge the gap between his cuddly charm and the character’s supposed malevolence. It’s as if Shirley Temple had been cast as the villain in 1960.

Then there are the puzzlingly incongruous outbreaks of extreme violence. One slaughter in particular suggests a take on the video game Far Cry rather than a celebration of Spielberg-adjacent 1980s action.

For all that, it is a pleasure to have something so unpretentiously light-hearted bounce onto the screen next to The Batman. There are worse ways of easing away the evening.