The Jewel of the Nile

We walk into the theater expecting absolutely nothing of substance, and that's exactly what we get, served up with high style. Read full review

Splashy, spoofy and goofy, The Jewel of the Nile, the sequel to "Romancing the Stone," is both more fun and less touching than the original -- what was once a love story is now an out-and-out romp. Though overproduced and uninvolving, "Jewel" is also a smartly written and playfully directed crowd pleaser, and in this Christmas season, you take what you can get. Read full review

If the truth be told, my eagerness to sit through a sequel to "Romancing the Stone" only slightly surpassed my desire to revisit my periodonist. Surprise: The Jewel of the Nile, the further adventures of romance novelist Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) and adventurer Jack Colton (Michael Douglas), is a good night at the movies. [16 Dec 1985, p.82]

The major problem with the sequel therefore is really the script, which was not written by Diane Thomas and which, coincidentally, did not meet with immediate approval by Turner. And so instead of surprising us in the rapid-fire manner of the original, ''The Jewel of the Nile'' takes people we know and runs them ragged through a new but unappealing location--the Arab desert--as they get caught in the middle of a holy war that doesn`t have much entertainment value given the recent number of incidents involving real-life terrorism in the area. Read full review

The action here is virtually nonstop and the special effects are often astounding: good and bad guys battle atop speeding trains and the lovers dangle perilously over cliffs and ride through stampeding desert tribes. But THE JEWEL OF THE NILE is missing the faux-innocent tone and consistent narrative invention that made ROMANCING THE STONE work. Read full review

As a sequel to Romancing the Stone, the script of The Jewel of the Nile is missing the deft touch of the late Diane Thomas but Lewis Teague's direction matches the energy of the original. Read full review

The sparkly but flawed sequel to the couple's last caper. [13 Dec 1985, p.29]

It is mainly the characters who have suffered in Jewel of the Nile. The bouncy relationship between Turner and Douglas has been lost; she appears mindlessly headstrong, he devotes his time to extricating her from trouble. A superior comic, DeVito has a one-note role of constant choler. [16 Dec 1985]

Only distinguishable from the original movie by its obvious cheapness. Read full review

Derivative as it was, ''Romancing the Stone'' did have a certain spunk, thanks to its contrast between the workaday life of Joan Wilder, romance novelist (played so gamely by Kathleen Turner), and the far-flung adventures into which the screenplay propelled her. Sadly for the sequel, the novelty in that contrast was more than used up the first time around. This time, through no fault of his own, the director Lewis Teague (the first film was directed by Robert Zemeckis) has little more to do than construct a retread. Read full review

It's a rare sequel that fritters away the appeal of the original so completely: within minutes, this continuation of Romancing the Stone has reduced the Kathleen Turner-Michael Douglas couple to a nightmare pairing of the gushingly idiotic and the sourly venal. Read full review