Romancing the Stone

The 80s were marked in the realm of light film entertainment by an effort to imitate the enormous success of adventure comedies about Indiana Jones, which were set in exotic locales and shamelessly drew from pulp literature and fallen genres. Romancing the Stone is a typical example of this wave. Thanks to the cast, especially the presence of the then extremely popular Kathleen Turner and the star Michael Douglas, the film remains watchable even today, although it is nowhere near the Indiana Jones series. The screenplay is average, the humor has dull moments, and above all, after all these years, some films don't have the same impact as they did when they were made. Overall impression: 55%. (01/21/2013)

A dashing Michael Douglas, the likeable Kathleen Turner, and Robert Zemeckis at the start of his amazing career. The great reviews didn't lie and I thoroughly enjoyed one of the most successful and funny adventure films ever made. Simply a classic that our TV stations can always rely on... (09/02/2012)

Romancing the Stone holds the opportunistic trump card in that the whole shoddiness of the plot simply comes from the fact that it's deliberately a "romance/adventure novel for women", which was also written by a waitress (the writers listed here are just post-production rewrites, the actual screenwriter Diane Thomas died two years after the film was released and thus this was her only script). The problem is, Michael Douglas handles one role perfectly, that of a corrupt city bastard; and yet he doesn't quite work in everything else. The classic post-colonial romance about how a dangerous exotic country makes a romantic backdrop for two white people isn't such a problem in the end (at least if you're white and you just grew up on these stories), the problem is when I see this small-town boy brandishing a machete or shouting Travolta-like in a white jumpsuit and I'm supposed to feel like I belong in that environment. It's a shame, too, because of Kathleen Turner, who is top-notch here and she shoulders almost all the functional comedy. (05/10/2021)