3 out of 5

Directed by: Robert Zemeckis

While we can look back and back and back to films from our youth or generations before and find the filmic notes that would become tropes, Romancing the Stone is a film that, regardless of when it would’ve been made, requires tropes to exist. It revels in the comfort of them, and does sidestep them at points, very pleasingly, but its helmers – a young Robert Zemeckis as director; gone-too-soon screenwriter Diana Thomas – know how to maintain that balance so we can watch with ease, intrigued and entertained but purposefully unchallenged.

I bucketed this into an Indiana Jones riff back in the day, and it certainly has those elements, with a fabled treasure as a quest, and a guy in a hat swinging on vines, but in the same way that the movie opens with writer Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) visualizing the conclusion to her latest sweaty romance novel, before dropping us back into the happy-but-single messy-haired cat lady reality of its author, ‘Romancing the Stone’ feels like the “grounded” version of a post-Raiders of the Lost Ark film, pulpy in plenty of ways, but with an eye on remembering that these are regular people involved in antics, and that regular life comes bundled with both the silly and surprising.

Providing her newest tome to her editor, we get some precursor: Joan writes great love tales, but is single herself; however- and we might suppose this is thanks to a woman writing the script, and also a pretty fresh director at the helm – Joan is not a spinster, and the film takes a couple beats to make it clear that she’s okay on her own. Still, y’know, the fantasy of her books is nice.

Elsewhere, some cartoonish thugs (a white-suited, gun-chewing Danny DeVito; the loves-his-pet-crocodile Zack Norman) have kidnapped Joan’s sister, and require a particular item in Joan’s possession – a treasure map – to be brought to them in order to release Sis. One threatening phone call later, and Joan is off to Colombia. Only, once there, travel mishaps strand her in the jungle, with corrupt cop Zolo (Manuel Ojeda) after her as well. Though toughing it out, it’s good that ex-pat Jack T. Colton (Michael Douglas) crosses paths with her – he can use a gun, and offers to get her to a phone for some moneys.

From here, you can trace out the basic beats: the item the thugs and cop are after is a fabled treasure that Colton convinces Joan is maybe worth them finding first; but is he double-crossing her? Is their romance real?; and the hijinx that ensue escaping from their pursuers via rickety-bridge traversings and waterfall divings and off-road chases and hidden caves…

The special sauce that elevates this is Wilder’s and Colton’s relationship: while we get moments of damsel-in-distress and Douglas checking out Turner’s legs, the former is only the springboard for realizing that Joan takes care of herself (and without any obnoxious guiding hand from Colton), and the latter is somewhat a self-referential riff to how Joan writes her books, and it’s not until later in the film that the two are allowed to actually converse and form a bond. It’s as rushed as any Hollywood romance, but it’s structure is more classic, playing lightly into we-bicker-and-then-we-love-one-another, but without pushing it too much – we like both of these characters as relative people within the context of the flick.

There are good laughs, well-staged stunts, and a willingness to go broad and slapsticky, or to get fairly grisly, both within the campy frame. At the same time, there’s a very breezy, offhand flair to this that seems almost avoidant of the large scale of Indy, such that the stakes never quite feel real, the action has more of a sitcom feel to it than thrills, and certain elements are immediately superfluous – like the sister kidnapping itself, and the MacGuffin treasure that is way too clearly only that; the plot, perhaps trying to be a little meta but not leaning into it enough, is constructed solely of reasons to get people from A to B.

…Which is all a consequence of how Romancing the Stone, when it came out, or ten or twenty or X years later, even if you’ve never seen a film before, was never meant to be “original.” It requires a fondness for fantasy; an imagination of how Love should be, what an Action Movie looks like and so on, and then gives you all of that with a knowing wink, while making sure to do due diligence of being a competent flick at the same tie.