1985, Movies

The Jewel of the Nile (1985, Lewis Teague)

Whatever charms Romancing the Stone possessed, are generally lacking in this bizarre, dated and probably offensive sequel.

As the GF said, if you are upset about “cultural appropriation” in art, you should watch this film. Whatever perceived slights are occurring in art created by white people in this day and age are far, far less offensive than what you will find here. The ’80s were a different time.

Putting that aside, this film has ‘sequel’ written all over it. Everything about it is from the sequel book; there’s a tone of cliches we’ve seen in just about every sequel ever and, like so many sequels, those cliches are kind of ticked off as we go and the underlying film is lacking in terms of story. Much like Temple of DoomThe Jewel of The Nile is like a series of adventure set-pieces strung together with barely any plot and lots of gags, only Temple of Doom is a masterpiece in comparison.

Honestly, to chronicle problems with this film would’ve required taking notes (or tweeting) and I did not do that. But most of what worked in the first film (and I’m not a huge fan of that movie) does not work here, and so much of it feels like a retread or an re-imagining of the first movie instead of, you know, writing a new story.

But, despite its objective badness, I still laughed more than I should have, and its somewhat likable if you can ignore how unbelievably tone death this film is to literally everything about the people who live on and around the Nile river (and in Africa as a whole).

3/10

  • Directed by Lewis Teague
  • Produced by Michael Douglas
  • Written by Mark Rosenthal, Lawrence Konner, Based on Characters by Diane Thomas
  • Starring:
    • Michael Douglas as Jack Colton
    • Kathleen Turner as Joan Wilder
    • Danny DeVito as Ralph
    • Spiros Focás as Omar Khalifa
    • Avner Eisenberg as Jewel
    • Hamid Fillali as Rachid
    • Daniel Peacock as Rock Promoter
    • Holland Taylor as Gloria
    • Guy Cuevas as Le Vasseur
    • Peter DePalma as Missionary
    • Mark Daly Richards as Pirate
    • The Flying Karamazov Brothers
    • Paul David Magid as Tarak
    • Howard Jay Patterson as Barak
    • Randall Edwin Nelson as Karak
    • Samuel Ross Williams as Arak
    • Timothy Daniel Furst as Sarak
  • Music by Jack Nitzsche
  • Cinematography by Jan De Bont
  • Edited by Peter Boita, Michael Ellis
  • Distributed by 20th Century Fox
  • Release date: December 11, 1985
  • Running time: 107 mins
  • Country: United States
  • Language: English
  • Budget: $25 million
  • Box office: $96.7 million

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