Looking like a resurrected Heath Ledger in his prime - albeit with far less acting talent - Charlie Hunnam storms the battlefields of World War I and swings his machete through the period-piece-and-jungle-exploration British drama The Lost City of Z like a 20th century citizen who is somehow misplaced one hundred years into the past. It's not that the character he portrays - Percy Fawcett, a young British military officer whose name sounds like a sink in a feminine designed restroom - looks completely out of place as he searches the Amazonian jungles for a long lost city, here referred to only as "Z"; it's just that he never quite externalizes that inner turmoil that characters in such obsession-turned-to-madness movies generally tend to (Aguire: The Wrath of God and The Pledge come to mind).
Perhaps that's the reason that Z mostly comes across as a Merchant-Ivory production crossed with a less-than-exciting Indiana Jones escapade: it simply fails to romanticize its setting, nor does it evoke the action and adventure adrenaline of Steven Spielberg's famed whip wielding American explorer. The Lost City of Z is a grand looking movie, exquisitely shot and superbly designed from a pure production standpoint, but at nearly two and a half hours, it never quite achieves that epic status. It comes close, though.
B
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