Slugs, butts and true love: How The Lost City could revive the screwball action-adventure romantic comedy

Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum play lovers at the centre of a new adventure that harks back to an old-fashioned kind of movie, writes Geoffrey Macnab

All dressed up in the wilderness: Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum in ‘The Lost City’ (Kimberley French)

Sandra Bullock in the jungle picking slugs off Channing Tatum’s butt... who said true romance on screen was dead?

The scene in question happens midway through The Lost City. It’s a goofy moment in a goofy film and yet industry analysts are watching the box office performance of Bullock’s latest comic vehicle with intense curiosity. As trade paper Variety recently noted, the film “harkens back to a genre that has mostly fallen out of favour with moviegoers”, namely the star-driven screwball action-adventure romantic comedy. It’s as if Bullock is performing CPR on the genre, trying to get its heart beating again.

Bullock plays novelist Loretta Sage. Early in the film, she is in the bath, drinking chardonnay with ice and dreaming about being somewhere far, far away. She is the author of various bodice-ripping novels, full of sex and adventure, with bits of archaeology thrown in for good measure. But the world of her fiction is very different to Loretta’s mundane existence. The novelist is a widow who despises her readers, hates her life and is contemptuous of the dimwitted male model Alan (Channing Tatum) who wears a blond wig and pretends to be Dash McMahon, the strapping hero of her books. Alan’s party trick at book launches is to rip off his shirt.