LOST AND FOUND

Back in 2015, Tom Cruise appeared in “Rogue Nation,” starring, among others, Rebecca Ferguson, who played a British spy working undercover to infiltrate a terrorist group hell-bent on ending the world. (It wouldn’t be a “Mission Impossible” movie otherwise.)

I bring this up because Ferguson makes her entrance in a slinky yellow gown at a performance of the Vienna State Opera’s “Tosca.” Bullets fly. She and Ethan Hunt meet cute and they end up escaping the terrorist thugs by rappelling off the building, but not before she asks Cruise’s character to save her shoes. I’m thinking Manolo Blahniks, probably. The scene stuck out for me because I can’t recall a woman in distress in a movie more concerned about her shoes than her own hide.

I was reminded of this watching Sandra Bullock in the new Paramount release “The Lost City.” Bullock plays Loretta Page, a romance novelist forced to wear an outrageous purple sequined jumpsuit to launch her latest book. But she ends up wearing the jumpsuit like a suit of armor throughout most of the movie, and in the direst of circumstances, so it’s almost a character all its own. And in fact it plays a significant role in one pivotal scene.

“Lost City” also stars Channing Tatum, who most recently played a charming former Army Ranger in “Dog.” Tatum is the cover model for Loretta’s novels and, as the central character Dash, enjoys a female following that outstrips even Loretta’s. But she dismisses him as a dim-witted hunk, and in the same way she dismisses her readership.

Though known best for her pot-boilers, Page is actually an archaeologist by trade and an expert in dead languages. And that’s what gets her in trouble with a wealthy media baron, played by a winning Daniel Radcliffe, who believes she can help him recover a crown of precious jewels hinted at in one of her novels.

All of this leads to a jungle adventure that mirrors, and even improves upon, Robert Zemeckis’s 1984 romp “Romancing the Stone,” with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner.

Though here, Bullock’s character is no damsel in distress. She holds her own as a kind of female Indiana Jones, but saddled with what she thinks is a superficial gym rat whose only attributes are perfect pecs and abs.

Yet Tatum’s character, whose real name is Alan, shows he’s more of a hero than anything Loretta has described in the pages of her books. And his vulnerability is on display in a cheeky scene where Alan doffs his clothes so Loretta can pull leeches from his backside.

“The Lost City” is a romantic comedy that’s better than it has any right to be. And that might be due to the chemistry between the two leads. Tatum is proving to be a solid performer with more depth than his “Magic Mike” moves ever suggested and Bullock oozes the A-lister charm that has served her well in at least a dozen other films.

There’s a scene late in the movie where the two engage in a sexy, Latin-flavored clinch. For a moment at least, “Lost City” is about two people losing themselves in an adventure of the heart.