Lost City (2022)

Sandra Bullock can do, "awkward, yet attractive, dork" role in her sleep. It's interesting it works with Channing Tatum also playing essentially an awkward, yet attractive, dork. But when the two of them are together on-screen, Tatum plays up being well-meaning but largely clueless more, and Bullock leans on her character having archaeological knowhow.

So, "awkward" in that she's emotionally repressed out of grief and doesn't interact well. I actually had to walk away during the book tour event scene at the start, because she looked so miserable and ill at ease I felt bad for her. Meanwhile Tatum is playing awkward in the sense he's wildly out of his depth, but trying hard to impress her.

I don't know if they have romantic chemistry or not, but they play off each other well enough on the comedy side of things. Again, even though they both go to the "shout when startled" approach. Neither really seems to be the "straight man" in the duo. If I had to pick one, maybe Tatum. He's the butt of a lot of jokes, with his attempts to be the hero, but that's not really the same thing.

Daniel Radcliffe plays the bad guy as someone with an inferiority complex, who is trying to be a James Bond villain without being much good at it. The fake-polite conversation, the condescension towards his subordinates, the big gestures. Like having a back wall slide open to reveal a VTOL aircraft landing, even though that probably damaged everyone's hearing, and scattering all those cheeses he bought to try and seem like a swell guy. It's fun, the character is trying so hard to pull this scheme off, sunk all of himself into its success, but he loses his composure as soon as things go off-course.

It's fine, as a popcorn movie goes. Something to throw on for 2 hours and just let wash over you. The movie's trying to do a whole arc about how Bullock's character has been dying a slow death of isolation since her husband died, and she needs to move forward. I know because the movie tells us these things explicitly more than once, although I thought the montage at the start, contrasting her life with her publicist's voicemails, handled it fine.

Does it pull it off? I guess, in the sense the character seems revitalized at the end. The movie seems to feel she's recaptured her zest for life. Though I wonder if she resumed her work in archaeology, in addition to writing archaeology-themed romance novels. Archaeology seemed to be her real passion, it's just that she couldn't make a living that way. Have her go back to that, if it's important to her.