“The Lost City” (M) **

BY the time I reached double-digit age, I was collecting empty soft-drink bottles to sell at a penny a pop to raise money to get me into the Saturday matinee at the movies – latest episode of the current Columbia serial, Hopalong, Gene or the Durango Kid in the B-movie, feature after interval. 

Looking back nowadays at the influence movies played in arranging my little grey cells B4-TV, I sometimes wonder whether my mother made a mistake by taking me to see “The Young Mr Pitt” at the Liberty cinema. I may not have understood a biopic about a 24-year-old British prime minister but experiencing its moving, talking images on the wall of a cave full of seats was life-changing.

So to eight decades later and the confection by writing/directing brothers Aaron and Adam Nee of an action movie that harked me back to that night. They’ve tried to build a framework of respectability around the kind of plot that might have competed with the best of that era’s B-movies.

Sandra Bullock plays two roles in the 200th application (mostly in TV) use of the main words of its title, playing novelist Angela whose archaeologist late husband had worked on a remote Atlantic island, thereby qualifying her to decipher hieroglyphs on the rock walls of a jungle-covered ruined temple at sight.

Eccentric zillionaire acquirer of nobody-else-has-one-like-this trophies, Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe), cruels the launch of Angela’s latest novel which illustrates such a hieroglyph.

Beef-cake stirrer of female hormones Alan (Channing Tatum) illustrates the dust jackets of Angela’s books, the latest of which morphs into the movie’s main story in which Alan becomes Dash who shows up in the jungle trying to be Loretta’s (Sandra Bullock) protector. In an extended cameo, super-hero Jack (Brad Pitt), Dash’s best chum protects Loretta and Alan in the jungle until meeting an unexpected and untimely end.

Still with me, reader?

This version of “The Lost City” illuminates the difference between “silly” and ”stupid” (there IS a difference) and raises questions about which more appropriately summarise it, – silly-ly stupid or stupidly silly. It really doesn’t matter. They’re both correct.

At all cinemas