So one of the weird things about the superhero monoculture is that I find myself interested in movies that twenty years ago would have been generic action movies, simply because nowadays they’re kinda rare and unusual in comparison to Yet Another Marvel Movie.

And so this one in particular is a kind of cross between an action movie and a rom com — I’m put in mind of The Mummy, even though I haven’t seen that in 25 years and might be misremembering it — where Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum go through a series of misadventures and discover that maybe they don’t hate each other after all. (This is not a spoiler if you are a sentient adult.)

It’s not a great movie or anything; I can’t imagine anyone ever saying that this was their favorite movie. But it’s fun enough, with writing that rises to the level of genuinely amusing in some places. It’s got a solid cast, too — Harry Potter as an evil billionaire, Brad Pitt as (with a wink) the coolest guy in the movie, and then of course the protagonist couple as an archaeologist turned romance writer, and her kinda-stupid cover model. It seems like a high-powered cast for a piece of fluff like this, but idk, maybe that’s just how movies are now.

As a side note, this is yet another movie where the female lead is significantly older than the male lead (Bullock is 58, Tatum is 42). I remember decades ago all these pieces about how middle-aged women were left out of Hollywood until they were old enough to play matron roles, and how movies would pair up 50-year-old men with 20-year-old women; between this and that J-Lo movie, it really feels like that is a thing that’s changed in the culture.