1 out of 5

Directed by: Lewis Teague

Just a minute into The Jewel of the Nile, it felt like we – the viewers – were in trouble. Sharing the same general fantasy framing as the opening in Romancing the Stone, which, in a self-aware fashion, poked fun at the romance tropes writer Joan Wilder (Diane Keaton) is scripting into her latest novel, Jewel has Wilder and Jack Colton (Michael Douglas) playing out a pirate ship attack and rescue, with play-like sets and painted backgrounds and stilted dialogue indicative of the troubles Wilder is having scripting a successful followup to her last book. But this second attempt at genre lampshading and some meta-context on the movie we’re about to watch – Wilder and Colton are now a couple, but facing a crux at which they must each decide how their lives fit together beyond the initial dating honeymoon, and the pirate setup posits some representative choices for its proxies – falls incredibly flat on all fronts, with Lewis Teague’s direction and Jan de Bont’s DP work selling the spirit of the joke, but not any actual laughs or meaning: it’s just a very empty scene, with no sparkle between its leads, no laughs, and a kind of plain cluster of events that’s supposed to be either exciting or silly but just kind of happens. It’s stuff that looks sound on paper, but requires more passion to execute.

This is, essentially, the summary review of the movie, which was rather known to have a troublesome production, perhaps resulting in all of the misfires we end up seeing on screen. I mean, as a sequel, it does its duty: we find another reason for injecting Wilder and Colton into a similar MacGuffin-y quest for a treasure that gets them mixed up in broad hijinx – necessarily bigger and explodier because it’s a sequel – and it brings back Danny DeVito as Ralph, with a hate-on for the couple and also after the titular jewel; and it theoretically “advances” the character arc of our leads by, as mentioned above, exploring their relationship. (Which is only six months on, mind you.) But the specifics of how this is brought to screen are self-defeating at every turn: the odd-couple-to-lovers formula of Romancing presented us with leads who we liked, despite their individual foibles – there was an interesting mutual respect scripted between the two, and also enough avoidance of over-damseling Wilder and over-heroing Colton. Here, starting with that stilted opening, Colton has been turned into exactly the kind of smarmy, selfish, ignorant prick his Romancing persona avoided, and Wilder is now the fussy female who’s so easily swayed by a compliment but then pouts and oopsy-whoopsy saves the day. You can sense the actors fighting against the script at points, but then the rest of the movie’s drabness is there to wash those moments away. As to the story, Romancing played with pulp and camp but had a comparatively believable ramp-up to dropping us in it, whereas Jewel just feels ridiculous – and rather murkily conceived – as soon as would-be Arab emperor Omar (Spiros Focás) whisks Joan away to his country to write his biography, for the purpose of using her fiction skills to one-up his profile to the doubting peoples under his thumb. It just… doesn’t track. Again, on paper, this actually seems kind of fitting; on film, wholly unmotivated.

And Joan goes along, caution to the wind (and with some 80s white America grandstanding factoring in), leaving Colton to get grumpy and force a breakup, until he hears word – after running in to Ralph – that Omar might be in possession of ‘the jewel of the Nile,’ and he’s actually pretty evil y’all, so he goes running off to either save Joan or get the jewel or both or whatever.

None of this is outright bad, or executed poorly, but it is all perfunctory. Some larger action scenes involving a runaway jet and a train chase have some flair, but both also drag on for a bit too long and are staffed by these empty versions of our characters without clear motivations. While this was a script made specifically for the film, it comes across as both a stitch-up of multiple plots and something retroactively fitted to the characters; it is a patchwork of events, none exactly requiring Joan Wilder and Jack Colton. The filmmakers even forget to do much with one of the better returning jokes from Romancing: that Omar is a fan of Wilder’s books.

While the film hangs on to an acceptably distracting vibe, at about the midway point, after its first big chase, it runs nearly completely out of reasons to exist, and starts churning through further Indiana Jones riffs with racial stereotypes (Colton and Wilder shack up with a Nubian tribe for a bit, though this follows after the middle Eastern stereotypes to which we’ve already been subjected) and an overblown but undercooked ending that hardly makes any sense in terms of presenting Omar as a villain, or how and why his turnabout occurs. We are shown things, and just have to assume they fit the mold of what we’ve been told they are.

Though the racism isn’t as flagrant as Indy, as it’s more assumptive than outright, it struck me as more noxious in many ways because of how generally lazy the film’s construction feels, which is when my overall take started to turn wholly negative. There are no strong positives to this movie, and anything I could say works comes with addendums, and it’s on a sliding scale that’s comparing to the first movie, which is fun but not the best thing ever. There is no charm – Romancing’s big selling point, I’d say – and while there are smart ideas seeded into the script, the version on the screen does nothing with those ideas beyond just showing them, which feels like how Teague and de Bont and the producers approached the movie in general: just get it on the screen. By the time the credits run, The Jewel of the Nile has effectively sucked out any affection we might’ve had for the would-be franchise, and especially for these characters.