Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner attempted to recreate the magical spark of “Romancing the Stone” with this ambitious and essentially under-whelming sequel.
Cream-crackered from the exploits of their original adventure, we join the pair with Jack (Douglas) fulfilling his dream of cruising around the world and Joan (Turner) tagging along. With their romance clearly on the wane, the pair soon go their separate ways: Joan heads off to Egypt to work, albeit unwittingly, as a propaganda puppet for an Arab tyrant (Spiros Focas), with Jack staying behind to top up his tan.
Of course, the pair are soon back together and working the adventure circuit when Joan smells a rat and Jack springs to the rescue. Danny DeVito is again back as grunting deviant Ralph, though you can't help but wonder what the point of his presence is, other than a vague attempt to keep the original team together.
The stand-out performer is Avner Eisenberg as the title character (yup, the “Jewel” is in fact a bloke) with some great comic touches. But the pace is slow and the touch of Robert Zemeckis, whose directorial presence was a major contributory factor to the success of the first movie, is sorely missed. So too is the romantic sparkle between the two leads, which captured the imagination in “Romancing” but has gone irreversibly stale for this sequel.
There are, of course, some great moments, and the standard of comedy is again high (thanks predominantly to Eisenberg, who surprisingly went on to do very little of note after this). But “The Jewel of the Nile” isn't a patch on its predecessor.