This is not the movie poster for which you search. Try down corridor Z. What? You’re not looking for The Lost City of Z. Well what the hell Lost City do you think you’re searching for? What? Stop dangling my participles? Fuck you. Answer the question. Just The Lost City? Never heard of it. Let me consult the index. Uh….. surely you mean some other Lost City, eh? No? OK, it’s down the corridor labeled Forbidden Movies that Will Make You Claw Your Eyes Out. Yes, that’s an exaggeration. Maybe. Don’t come back to me to complain, you brought this on yourself!
The Lost City (2022) is in the same class of movies as Jungle Cruise (2021) in that it wants to evoke the same passions as did Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and again around archaeology, divinity, and romance. However, it’s not nearly as good as the enjoyable Jungle Cruise because replacing the driven archaeologist Dr. “Indiana” Jones of Raiders with a bereft widow, Loretta Sage, a romance book writer in career interruptus, who is annoyed by a smitten book cover model, while being kidnapped by a nutcase who has more money than sense (take a breath here), just ruins the story: rather than wonder just where the obsession will take her next in the absence of, well, obsession, the audience just tires of the schtick.
Which is not to say the movie is a total loss. The former military man hired to rescue Sage, Jack Trainer, was a source of endless amusement in a role of remarkable brevity, and the cover model’s reaction to him at least made me giggle a bit.
I wonder if I was supposed to giggle.
The nutcase, on the other hand, has no real life of his own; he exists to pay the bad guys who are pursuing the romance writer and her, uh, admirer around. He’s a poor replacement for Raider’s René Belloq, the Nazi’s French archaeologist who something of a cipher symbolizing the worst of archaeology prior to the modern age of archaeology. His pursuit of the object, rather than knowledge, invalidated his entire professional standing in Raiders, but heavens know if the general audience member realized that.
In the end, The Lost City needed at least two more drafts, and maybe three, along with a better title. The main story contains a number of ideas that might have worked, but feel like they came out of a bag labeled Plot Twists As Needed, with little organic or thematic movements to them. Even the supporting cast’s subplots, which can often outshine the primary plot line in a movie of this quality, were a disappointment. They felt tacked on as necessary distractions, rather than logical consequences of the antecedents to, and/or the developments during, this plot.
Too bad. I think the movie needed more Nazis, like Raiders of the Lost Ark had. And how often do you get to say that? As it is, it’s limp and forgettable, and the characters, who improbably manage to become cardboard stereotypes, exit stage left without attracting the least applause.
Well, excepting Jack. Jack Trainer. What a guy. We’ll miss. Him. No, miss him. For about a minute. Two minutes.
I wonder if a movie about Jack Trainer is in the works.
