There is, it must be said, something slightly depressing about the kind of aspirational entertainment we’re making these days – the homages our filmmmakers and television creators are crafting, the kind of things they’re hoping their work reminds us of. Once upon a time, directors were inserting winks to the likes of Welles, Powell and Pressburger, Kurosawa; these days, you can’t shake a stick without knocking over an affectionate throwback to Steven Spielberg or Robert Zemeckis. It’s not that these aren’t gifted filmmakers (well, in Zemeckis’s case, I guess the appropriate verb would be weren’t). It’s that they rarely labored under the assumption that they were making art; they just wanted to turn out solid, sturdily-crafted mainstream entertainments. And it says a lot about what passes for mainstream entertainment these days that we look back on that idea so fondly, and attempt so frequently to recreate it.

Take, for example, The Lost City, a new action/comedy from directors Aaron and Adam Nee. It’s a nakedly transparent riff on Zemeckis’s 1984 smash Romancing the Stone, a story of a repressed romance novelist who ends up, against her better judgment, living out the kind of jungle adventure she writes about in her books. The only real change of substance here is that our heroine is herself kidnapped (rather than seeking out her sister, as in Stone), and her partner on the journey is the Fabio-esque cover model for her novels.

The plot is absolute nonsense, as it should be. Feeling burnt-out and over, still mourning the death of her husband five years previous, Loretta Sage (Sandra Bullock) has just written what she hopes will be the last of her “Angela Lovemore” novels, and is about to depart on a book tour with deliciously dumb beefcake Alan (Channing Tatum). But before she wrote these cheeseball romances, Loretta was a serious historian, and some of that background in the new novel catches the eye of billionaire Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe, hamming it up gloriously). He wants her to use her translation skills to help him find the location of an ancient ruler’s tomb – and the priceless headdress within it – on a remote island in the Atlantic. She declines, and he’s not used to hearing no, so out comes the chloroform.

Alan goes to save her, with the help of a grizzled mercenary, played by Brad Pitt in a deliciously funny cameo. But once they break her out, the expert gets the Other Guys treatment, leaving these two absolutely hopeless, absolutely helpless people stranded in the middle of the jungle. Will they make it out alive? You can probably guess. Will they fall in love in the process? You can also probably guess. The name of the game here is not narrative suspense – it’s style and chemistry, how much fun we’ll have watching these good-looking movie stars follow their predetermined paths.

Both actors come to play. Tatum, who has always displayed a delightful sense of self-awareness, is doing some of the best himbo work of his life here. Bullock is Bullock, which is to say delightful – her comic timing is so sharp that even the clunker lines (and there are quite a few) land with a bang. They find an easy comic rhythm, mixing his doofiness and her exasperation, which works – the best of their back-and-forths is a very funny, very frantic conversation about the nuances of mansplaining (“I’m a woman, I can’t ‘mansplain’!” “I’m a feminist, I believe women can do anything”). And their romantic chemistry lights up when it needs to; the filmmakers thankfully dodge the tired notion that glasses and messy hair somehow makes their leading lady temporarily unattractive, and they also don’t pretend that it’s somehow odd for Tatum (16 years her junior) to have the hots for her. They know, as we do, that she looks like Sandra Bullock.

The Nee brothers, who directed the winning, weird, and very funny Tom-and-Huck update Band of Robbers a few years back, take this material exactly as seriously as they should; when Radcliffe announces “Welcome to the lost city!” and the angel choir swells, well, they know what they’re doing in a moment like that. But they also prove themselves capable directors of action – Pitt’s big rescue sequence is both thrilling and funny, and not a lot of filmmakers can pull that mix off.

At a full 120 minutes, The Lost City is more than a little flabby – it’s a joy to see Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Oscar Nuñez, and Patti Harrison in supporting roles, but their scenes often feel like marking time – and the execution is occasionally clumsy (it feels like there are a lot of added-with-ADR jokes). The filmmakers come from the micro-budget world, and wear their nervousness about selling out on their sleeves; in a key dialogue scene, Alan explains how he was initially embarrassed by the fluff they make, before meeting an enthusiastic fan and asking himself, “How could I be this embarrassed by something that makes people happy?” It comes off not like a character beat, but like a film mounting a little tiny defense of itself, and of popular entertainment of its ilk, veering dangerously close to “let people enjoy things” territory. But it is enjoyable, very light and very charming, and since it’s not a remake (officially), not a sequel, not a reboot, and not an adaptation, it is by default the kind of movie we keep saying they don’t make anymore. So I’m fine with celebrating it, flaws and all.