Remove the pristine profile shots of Charlie Hunnam’s jawline and the darkened jungle B roll and you’ve lost 80% of this film. If only that was it’s only flaw. Sadly, themes and scenes do not connect. Called to the jungle, the men move forward as mapmakers, explorers, and discoverers attempting to make their marks on history as they walk deadly terrain, meet with danger, and never quite find what they are looking for. Sadly, neither do audience members as the story muddles on. 
The main character’s initial drive to regain family status too quickly translates to the goal of personal glory. Robert Pattinson, a bad casting decision, plays the mumbling, no talent co-explorer who helps lead a team of forgettable allies who lack enough purpose and/or enough backstory to validate rants or bouts with jungle-born illnesses. 
Even the addition of racial tensions in the early 1900s and a dash of feminist debate fall flat, and both come to no more than fluffy exposition and pointless conjecture for a plot leading nowhere. In the same way, Hunnam’s wanderlust prevails over practicalities and sends him over and over back into the jungle on fruitless endeavors to find a City that stays lost.
Splatter: on FILM 