‘The Lost City’: signs of the coming summer season

Above : Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum star in “The Lost City.” (Photo/Paramount Pictures)

Movie review : “The Lost City,” co-directed by Aaron Nee and Adam Nee, starring Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Brad Pitt. Playing in theaters and streaming on various services.

Summer isn’t scheduled officially to arrive for another two months. And based on the snow that still coated Spokane lawns only a short while ago, winter clearly is refusing to slip away unnoticed.

Yet take one look at the movies playing in area theaters, much less many of those available through steaming, and it’s fairly obvious that the summer-movie season is already upon us.

One prime example: “The Lost City,” which opened in theaters a full month ago yet – as evidenced by the half-full house on a recent Saturday afternoon – is still attracting crowds, another hopeful sign that pandemic fears are abating.

Co-directed by the Nee brothers, Aaron and Adam – and based on a team-written script –  the project reportedly was seven years in the making. But when production finally did get under way, it did so with some fairly decent comic star power in the central roles.

Sandra Bullock stars as Loretta Sage, a successful romance novelist who has reached a career impasse: She’d rather lounge in a warm bath drinking Chardonnay on ice than find a satisfactory ending to her latest romantic thriller.

Impelled to go on an in-person promotional tour by her publisher, Beth (played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph ), Loretta is discomfited during one public interview both by having to wear a bright, spangly one-piece and by having to share the stage with the male model, Alan Caprison (played by Channing Tatum ), whose sexy image graces the covers of all her novels.

The interview ends, predictably enough, disastrously – though that is just the beginning of Loretta’s ordeal. In true “Romancing the Stone” fashion – the 1984 romantic adventure-comedy starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas – Loretta finds herself whisked away from her insular life and soon facing a kind of real-life adventure that mirrors one of her fictional plotlines.

That adventure involves a villainous rich guy with a gender-neutral name (Abigail Fairfax, played effectively enough by one-time “Harry Potter” star Daniel Radcliffe ). Fairfax kidnaps Loretta because he thinks she can help him find both a lost tomb on a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean and the treasured crown that’s hidden there. Alan – whose cover-guy persona has him trying to act like Loretta’s character Dash McMahon – takes off in pursuit.

Complicating things are the two secondary characters who enter the scene, one being the publisher Beth who also comes looking for Loretta, the other being Jack Trainer (played by Brad Pitt ) – a mercenary guy whom Alan, who is nothing like the character of Dash, hires as a means of helping him play the hero. And, of course, there’s an active volcano that threatens them all.

Much of what “The Lost City” offers is both familiar and predictable, the kind of storyline that in decades past might have featured the likes of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert . But we don’t necessarily want originality from summer films, even those that open in late winter, much less those that aren’t remotely classic yet mirror classic themes. What “The Lost City” does offer is decent locations (much of the film was shot in the Dominican Republic) and actors who are willing to make fun of their sexy and/or more serious images.

Doing so is easier for Bullock, who is known as much for her dramatic roles – she won a Best Actress Oscar for her role in 2009’s “The Blind Side” – as she is for her comedy parts in such films as 2000’s “Miss Congeniality.” Tatum is known more as a sex-pot, whether in the 2006 dance film “Step Up” or Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 male-stripper study “Magic Mike.” Yet as Alan, Tatum takes pains to deflect his sexuality – even if he does do an obligatory shirtless scene – by being a doofus. A loving, supportive doofus, but a doofus nonetheless.

And that is the charm of “The Lost City,” slight as it is: It boasts a familiar plot, told just well enough, but buoyed by two skilled movie stars unafraid to play against type, resulting in a passable summer treat and, more important, a promise of better films to come.

An edited version of this review was broadcast previously on Spokane Public Radio.