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Every writer knows what it’s like: that feeling of creative fatigue so stifling that words tumble out with the ease of a nearly-empty ketchup bottle’s last few drops. For Loretta (Sandra Bullock), the tetchy romance-novelist heroine of Aaron and Adam Nee’s The Lost City, that feeling has turned chronic. She’s been trapped in that recognizable dry spell throughout the writing of her latest novel, eventually opting to leave things at an unsatisfactory cliffhanger because thinking up new scenes sounds worse than torture. Now 20 books into an airport-core romantic-adventure series — the kind whose covers boast an oil-slathered, muscle-bound hunk with long blonde hair embracing our female protagonist — Loretta is beginning to consider her oeuvre schlocky trash and not the meaningful escapist fun it is to her loyal following. Happiest knocking back chilled glasses of white in the bathtub, she longs for her late husband and the anthropology career that now only decoratively factors into her literary life.

Loretta is practically forced by her best friend and publisher, Beth (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, making the most of a limited role), onto a long and punishing book tour whose stops are zhuzhed up with appearances from Alan (Channing Tatum), Loretta’s vacuous-but-goodhearted go-to cover model, and an on-loan sparkly fuschia jumpsuit Loretta unhappily wears that will be important to the plot later. But Loretta gets through just one date before getting unexpectedly kidnapped. Chloroforming the author onto a private plane, the culprit is a rabid-eyed, white-suited billionaire named Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe). He’s convinced Loretta, with all the anthropological expertise shown off in her books, is the only person who could translate an ancient scroll that could lead him to the Crown of Fire, a glittering treasure suspected to lie somewhere at the heart of a far-flung island in the Atlantic. Time is of the essence because the volcano there is due to turn the place into ash any minute. He won’t take no for an answer. 

Read the full column on 425.