Take the romance out of the wild-adventurer genre, however, and you’re generally left with a very different beast, one where the ugly colonialist underpinnings and leading western perspective of such stories are more pointedly foregrounded. Klaus Kinski in the ‘magnificently deranged’ Fitzcarraldo. More happily, it probably gave us the spry, sparky Romancing the Stone and its copy-pasted but still charming sequel, The Jewel of the Nile (both on Disney+), two frenetically busy throwback capers set in Colombia and north Africa respectively, modernised by the flinty, distinctly 80s interplay between Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas. It declared “the return of the great adventure” in its tagline and launched both a franchise and assorted imitators – among them, neatly enough, a lesser, jokier remake of King Solomon’s Mines. It was the model that Spielberg emulated – along with more cheap-and-cheerful gung-ho serials of the 20s and 30s – when Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981 Amazon Prime) irresistibly revived the romantic wilderness romp. One year before The African Queen, MGM had a box-office smash with an unapologetically hokey and grandly enjoyable take on H Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (Apple TV), substantially changing the novel to accommodate a female co-lead in Deborah Kerr, and given enthralling sweep by months of arduous location shooting across Africa, all in iridescent Technicolor. In terms of spectacle, at least, sometimes they really don’t make ’em like they used to. ‘Still splendid’: Bogart and Hepburn in The African Queen. What sticks is the game, genuinely funny sparring between Bullock’s reserved romance novelist and Tatum’s likably inept himbo. Set predominantly on a remote Atlantic island, attractively played by the Dominican Republic, it’s complicated by all manner of conflicting treasure-hunt schemes that promptly leave your memory the second the credits roll. Whether or not that’s the case, it still works: The Lost City – just out on multiple VOD platforms – is a breezy, bouncy romp. The romantic adventure film, meanwhile, has long been a Hollywood standby based on pretty outdated notions of gender crossover interest: women will come for the romance, studio execs reasoned, and men will tolerate that for the exotic action and derring-do. The far-flung great outdoors – be it Amazonian jungle or African plain – is among the most eternal antagonists in Hollywood cinema: it gives film-makers spectacle and actors obstacles, lending a sense of scale and heft to even the slightest stories. W hen The Lost City unassumingly racked up £160m at the global box office this spring, it proved a few things: the enduring appeal of the adult-targeted, star-driven romantic comedy, a genre that franchise-fixated studios have nonetheless sidelined of late the near-supernatural ability of Sandra Bullock to conjure chemistry with just about any co-star you care to throw at her, in this case the resurgent Channing Tatum and that laughs can still be wrung from the age-old premise of sticking two beautiful people in the wilderness and letting them fight their way out of it.
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