112 min | PG-13 | March 25, 2022 | Paramount Pictures
A reclusive romance novelist gets kidnapped by an eccentric billionaire who wants her to find a real lost treasure. Her dim cover-model muscle mounts a rescue. The map leads exactly where you think it does.
Loretta Sage writes pulpy adventure romances and hates every minute of it. She is a widow who has stopped living and now resents the fictional fantasy that pays her bills. Daniel Radcliffe’s deranged billionaire abducts her because her latest novel encodes the location of an actual lost city. Alan, the himbo who poses as her cover hero Dash, decides to rescue her and prove he is more than a wig and a chest. The film is a throwback jungle adventure built entirely on the gap between the fantasy men perform and the people underneath.
Sandra Bullock plays Loretta with brittle exhaustion that slowly thaws. She spends the first act in a sequined purple jumpsuit she cannot take off, and Bullock mines real comedy from dragging that absurd costume through the mud. Channing Tatum plays Alan as a sincere idiot who is wounded that nobody respects him. Tatum commits to the cluelessness without winking, which is why the leech sequence lands. Daniel Radcliffe plays the villain Abigail Fairfax as a petulant rich boy starved for legacy. Brad Pitt drops in as the elite rescue operative Jack Trainer and walks off with a ten-minute stretch of pure movie-star ease.
Directors Aaron Nee and Adam Nee, working from a script they wrote with Oren Uziel and Dana Fox, stage the action with bright, oversaturated digital photography that flattens the jungle into a postcard. The look is glossy and weightless on purpose. The editing favors quick reaction cuts that keep the two leads bouncing off each other rather than building any real geographic tension. The Nee brothers know the set pieces are an excuse for banter and they cut accordingly. The result moves fast and never trusts a quiet moment to breathe.
This is a competent crowd-pleaser that knows exactly what it is borrowing and from whom. It runs the Romancing the Stone playbook without adding a single new page. Bullock and Tatum generate enough warmth to carry the formula, and Pitt’s cameo papers over the slack in the middle. The film never reaches for anything beyond a pleasant evening, and it hits that modest target dead center.