For those who don’t have a couple of hours to look at the cheerfully dumb comedy “The Misplaced Metropolis,” simply stare on the poster. Nearly all the pieces you might want to find out about this nonsensical lark is crammed into the one sheet: the celebrities, the tropical location, the Bruckheimer-esque fireball. The poster is promoting intercourse and violence and apparent laughs, with Sandra Bullock’s sequined purple onesie doing the heavy comedian lifting. And whereas she and Channing Tatum are the headliners, the studio has hedged its bets by additionally cramming in a leering goat and a Fabio-ed Brad Pitt.
The goat and Pitt are among the many excessive factors of the film, a high-concept romp a couple of widowed author, Loretta Sage (Bullock), making a tortuous re-entrance into the world. A profitable romance novelist, Loretta writes books that includes a hunky dreamboat and throbbing verbs. For strained causes, she is kidnapped whereas on a promo tour with the quilt mannequin for her books, Alan (Tatum). He tries to rescue her and shortly they’re joking via a jungle journey that includes a misplaced treasure, and a deranged wealthy villain (Daniel Radcliffe) and his minions. Bullets and jokes fly, not at all times hitting their targets.
That’s kind of the film, which is mainly a automobile for Bullock to play her most enduring function: Sandra Bullock, your supremely likable BFF. Real but packaged, challenged however unsinkable, the Bullock BFF has been a mainstay for many years. She’s endured tough patches, as in “Velocity 2,” however has at all times bounced again, buoyed by a shrewdly deployed, indomitable persona that’s healthful, sardonic and goofy, although not (normally) insultingly so. Though she will be able to deal with a spread of genres, she excels at comedy partly as a result of she will be able to play off a variety of performers: Like all BFFs, she makes a beneficiant double act.
That stated, it takes some time for Bullock and Tatum to search out their groove, partially as a result of he isn’t as snug in his lunkhead function as he must be. He’s enjoying a traditional candy dope, a cliché function he handles fluidly when in Alan’s exaggerated cover-model drag, full with flowing hair and peekaboo waxed chest. However he’s much less facile when his character comes off as impossibly silly, moments he performs by affecting a little bit of a Mark Wahlberg whiny singsong. Is it homage, coincidence — who is aware of? Regardless of the case, Tatum appears happier when his character fares higher too, permitting him and Bullock to settle right into a breezy intimacy.
For essentially the most half, “The Misplaced Metropolis” delivers precisely what it guarantees: A few extremely polished avatars quipping and hitting their marks whereas often being upstaged by their second bananas (Da’Vine Pleasure Randolph included). There are some lodging to modern mores. Tatum bares extra pores and skin than Bullock does, flashing his sculpted hindquarters in a scene that, just like the film general, isn’t as sharp or as humorous appropriately. However whereas Loretta isn’t as helpless as she may need been again within the outdated studio days, that is nonetheless a couple of man rescuing a girl whose eye make-up by no means runs even when she does.
The director brothers Adam and Aaron Nee deal with the numerous transferring elements capably, working from a script they wrote with Oren Uziel and Dana Fox. Every thing appears to be like vivid and in focus, and there are moments when the bodily comedy pops, largely when Pitt swashbuckles in. It’s clear that somebody concerned within the making of this film is a fan of Robert Zemeckis’s 1984 romp “Romancing the Stone,” certainly one of a number of journey pastiches made within the wake of “Raiders of the Misplaced Ark.” Whereas “Raiders” transcends its inspirations with wit and Steven Spielberg’s filmmaking and “Romancing” tries laborious to do the identical, “The Misplaced Metropolis” stays a replica of a replica.
It’s too dangerous that “The Misplaced Metropolis” isn’t extra formidable, as a result of a girl writing her desires into actuality is a probably wealthy riff on the Pygmalion and Galatea delusion. Like “Romancing the Stone,” “The Misplaced Metropolis” opens with a scene from a guide — cue the purple prose and dashing hero — that its novelist heroine is writing. In “The Misplaced Metropolis,” Loretta deletes the scene as a result of it doesn’t work, however she will be able to’t erase the hero. He’s a fantasy however he’s all hers. That’s the attraction of films like this, which at a minimal perceive that a few of us starvation for fairy tales, even those who promise the celebrities and ship Channing Tatum mooning.
The Misplaced Metropolis
Rated PG-13 for cold violence and partial nudity. Working time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters.