Review: Romancing the Stone (1984)

 Romancing the Stone (1984)

Rated PG

Score: 4 out of 5

So, a new movie came out last month. The Lost City, it’s called. It’s about a romance novelist who one day finds herself drawn into a tropical adventure straight out of one of her books, with a hunky hero by her side as she gets sucked into a search for hidden treasure deep in the jungle. It looks funny, I like the cast, the reviews are surprisingly solid...

...but the thing is, the first thought going through my mind as I watched the trailer was “wait a minute, didn’t they make this exact movie nearly forty years ago with Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas?” Because I couldn’t shake the feeling that the plot of The Lost City was cooked up after a long night spent watching Romancing the Stone, Robert Zemeckis and Diane Thomas’ rom-com-action-adventure hybrid that, if it’s overlooked nowadays, is only because Zemeckis followed it up right after with Back to the Future. It’s unapologetically light and fluffy, and while I wouldn’t call it either the best romantic comedy of the ‘80s or the decade’s best swashbuckling adventure flick, Romancing the Stone remains a rock-solid example of everything it tries to be, a fun, thrilling, and charming genre mashup that’s surprisingly ahead of its time in a lot of ways and boasts a great cast at the top of their game.

Joan Wilder is a bestselling author who specializes in the kinds of steamy adventures you think of when you hear the words “romance novel”. From the moment we’re introduced to her in her New York apartment, it’s clear that she is about as far from her fair heroines as possible: she’s a lonely single woman whose only companion is her cat, one who writes her novels as a way of living the adventurous life she wishes she had. Like that of her sister Elaine, living in Colombia, who has come across a treasure map that has placed her in the crosshairs of the ruthless gangster Zolo who murders her husband Eduardo and kidnaps her for it, but not before she’s able to mail the map to Joan to keep it safe. (Careful what you wish for.) When Joan finds out that her sister is in peril, she flies down to Colombia with the map and suddenly finds herself living the kind of life that she previously only wrote about, complete with an encounter with a handsome and rugged American expat named Jack T. Colton who quickly becomes her guide through the South American jungle -- and perhaps more.

Kathleen Turner is the star of the show here as Joan, the film initially painting her as a rather tragicomic and instantly relatable figure. One look at her in her apartment lets you know exactly what kind of woman she is without the film having to spell it out for us, a lonely heart living vicariously through her books while her personal life is a mess. Her editor Gloria calls her out, and when she gets a chance to travel abroad to an exotic locale, she practically jumps at the opportunity without realizing what she’s getting herself into. She is out of her element in Colombia and likely would’ve died without Jack to bail her out, but fortunately, she does not stay that way for long. Joan is a character who easily could’ve been the most obnoxious character in her own movie, an annoying damsel in distress who contributes little to the plot and gets carried along by Jack and the villains, but she quickly grows out of her shell, proving that she can keep up with Jack and always had something far more than just a sad-sack Manhattanite in her. By the end of the film, Turner is nearly unrecognizable, looking and feeling as though a Meg Ryan or Zooey Deschanel character had slowly but surely turned into Lara Croft.

Michael Douglas’ Jack is key to bringing out Joan’s inner badass. Again, this is a character who could’ve easily come off as a dick, and indeed, that’s how he’s framed when we first meet him, a roguish criminal who’s only protecting Joan and putting up with her whining because she’s willing to pay him $375 in traveler’s checks. Yes, he’s handsome and looks like he just stepped off of one of the covers of Joan’s novels, but as Joan herself learns firsthand, it takes a lot more than that for someone to be the man of her dreams. Douglas is great as an action hero, one reminiscent more of Han Solo than Indiana Jones who’s more interested in getting paid and surviving day to day than in anything else, but more importantly, he’s great as a romantic hero too. Through his and Joan’s interactions, you get the sense that Joan slowly but surely starts to realize that she’s been wasting her life and needs to start living, Jack functioning like a male version of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl for her, albeit one who feels quite a bit more developed thanks to Douglas’ captivating performance.

The action and hijinks, of course, are a highlight. Whether it’s Joan finding out that the scary-looking drug runner is actually a huge fan of hers or the Jeep escape from Zolo’s goons that follows, this film wears its Indiana Jones influence on its sleeve but combines it with a more explicitly humorous streak, not quite a parody but still one that has plenty of fun with the genre in its fish-out-of-water story. Throughout the film, I was constantly at least chuckling at the jokes and/or being impressed by the action scenes, and while there’s nothing here that matches the heights of Indy’s greatest escapes or the biggest gut-busters of Bill Murray or Harold Ramis, quantity is a quality all its own, and this film did a lot to keep up a constant mood of fun adventure.

If there was a single weak link in the cast, it was largely Danny DeVito’s character Ralph, who’s working with the villain Zolo to get his hands on the treasure map. It’s through no fault of DeVito himself, who’s one of the funniest people in the film and gets some of its biggest laughs. Rather, I found myself wondering what purpose his character actually served given his screen time. He’s funny, but within the film, he felt like a one-note comic relief figure, a hapless minion who undermined the genuinely threatening nature of Manuel Ojeda’s Zolo through his routine incompetence. I think he would’ve been better off as either a one-scene wonder, a guy who helps kick off the plot and steals the show in that one scene before disappearing, or somebody who, underneath his goofy appearance and demeanor, actually manages to pose a serious threat to Joan and Jack. As it stood, the film stumbled the more his character was in the picture.

The Bottom Line

It’s not a flawless film, but as both a romantic comedy and an action-adventure flick, Romancing the Stone is easily one of the finer films of its time, thanks to a great cast and a premise that it mines a lot out of. For fans of retro ‘80s movies, this easily deserves its reputation.