The Lost City finally fills in the very specific movie gap that The Mummy left behind

polygon.com:

This review comes out of the 2022 media expo SXSW, where Polygon sent writers to look at the next wave of upcoming releases.

The adventure-romance genre has stood the test of time for a reason. At its best, it offers exotic, remote locations that don’t often show up in movies, a beautiful couple with good chemistry, and a compelling adventure with danger, a love story, and usually a solid sense of humor. After 1951’s The African Queen set the standard for adventure-romances by uniting its era’s biggest stars on a high-stakes trip, and 1984’s Romancing the Stone parlayed the same concept into a crowd-pleasing blockbuster, many filmmakers have tried to replicate the formula. But they’ve found it surprisingly difficult to nail well.

While the plot of The Lost City makes it sound notably similar to Romancing the Stone, it’s actually most successful as a successor to The Mummy, a film that found the comedy in the adventure-romance genre and inspired many competitors that failed to live up to it. The Lost City doesn’t have the most exciting or novel plot, and it doesn’t push action filmmaking forward. But it does feature two of the moment’s greatest movie stars coming in at the top of their rom-com game, and mixing adventure and love. Filmmaking brothers Aaron and Adam Nee (The Last Romantic, Band of Robbers) avoid many of the stereotypes these movies normally fall into, and along the way, they remind viewers that Channing Tatum is a perfect himbo, and Sandra Bullock is a longstanding rom-com queen.

Bullock stars as Loretta Sage, a former archeologist who has discovered that people aren’t really interested in books about lost civilizations, but they will certainly read a romance novel featuring a hot adventurer going to