Romancing the Stone

A classic adventure story that brilliantly transcends its fairly average formula (buttoned-up city gal is softened by devil-may-care chancer while outwitting baddies in foreign lands) through a mixture of perfect casting, lashings of chemistry between the stars and a clever script.

Turner and Douglas have great chemistry—in their best moments, they recall Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable on the road in It Happened One Night—helped by the fact that Douglas is willing to be undercut by both Turner and the screenplay.

The filmmakers have devised some clever twists on the earlier films they recall - Raiders of the Lost Ark and Peter Pan among them - and they reserve a good share of the derring-do for their heroine, who's a refreshingly far cry from the helpless ladies-in-distress of old. Under the direction of Robert Zemeckis, the action goes limp and perfunctory at a few key moments, weakening the picture's wallop. But it still packs a healthy amount of self-deflating fun.

Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner are wonderful together. They look great when they're in bed together and they look even better when they're fighting. Throw Danny DeVito into the mix and you've got a very enjoyable, watchable trio of heroes.

After a fairly promising getaway, Romancing the Stone gradually chases its tail into enough melodramatic dead ends to deteriorate into an expendable runaround, all too easy to shrug off as a miscalculated clone of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Heading for the jungles in her high heels, Turner is like a lot of unwitting screen heroines ahead of her, guaranteed that her drab existence is about to be transformed – probably by a man, preferably handsome and adventurous. Sure enough, Michael Douglas pops out of the jungle. The expected complications are supplied by the kidnappers, Danny DeVito and Zack Norman.

An elaborately produced, mostly charmless adventure-comedy that intends to make fun of a kind of romantic fiction that's one step removed from what the movie is all about.

OK let me tell you something about the movie that I like, Michael Douglas is one of my favorite actors. I even watched one of his movies. Kathleen Turner plays a romance novelist who wants to find her sister. Danny DeVito plays a really crooked smuggler. Michael Douglas's character Jack Colton looks just exactly like that guy from The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. That's unspoken for. Jack and Joan have great chemistry together. The scene is unexpected where Jack has the green emerald in his crotch and he dances to let the emerald scroll down his leg and kicks it in the air to let the bad guy catch it and the crocodile bites his hand off, now that's freaking grim. This is a very underrated film. Just brilliant! Danny DeVito plays Ralph and that guy who plays his mate Ira kidnapped Joan's sister so they can get the stone and the map and if Ralph and Ira can have the map and gem Joan and her sister can go. But they're not the bad guys, they're just crooks. The only villian in this movie is Zolo, he's the one who wants the stone. Remember when I said he got his hand bitten off by a crocodile? Yeah, and like I said ''It's freaking grim.'' I actually took me a while to watch this movie for some reason I have to watch this and the sequal to Romancing the Stone. The story, I know it all the way through. It's fantastic. The characters are well developed. It's just fxxking awsome.

From a time when Zemeckis stuck to ageless practical effects, "Romancing the Stone" is still a wonderful movie 40 years later.

After returning home following an editors meeting to discuss her latest romance novel, Joan discovers her apartment has been ransacked. Soon after she receives a frantic call from her sister who has been kidnapped telling her she must meet the kidnappers in Columbia. An adventure movie very much in the same vein as Raider’s of the Lost Ark, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner make for a great pairing and it’s easy to get swept along for the ride.

Kathleen Turner plays a mousy romance novelist who’s drawn into a South American adventure when her sister is kidnapped by an international smuggling ring. Fresh off the plane, she meets a slobbish, wannabe Indiana Jones (Michael Douglas), who agrees to act as her bodyguard and tour guide... for a price. Together, the unlikely pairing dodges bullets, navigates musty caverns, swings over chasms and makes friends in unlikely places, avoiding detection by the bad guys while cracking the riddles of an ancient treasure map. The lingering question, though, is whether Douglas’s rogue will still honor the agreed-upon price of $375 in traveler’s checks once he catches sight of a far loftier prize. This plot plays like one of its protagonist’s narrow, pulpy love stories. For a while, I thought that’s where it was headed: everything a figment of the sad, lonesome novelist’s imagination. Alas, while the adventure does inspire her to write a fictionalized account (which incites bays and swoons from her editor in a tacky bit of meta commentary), the similarities are dismissed as mere coincidence en route to a more superficial resolution. That leaves us with a light, trashy romp through the jungle, a couple moments of near-chemistry between the stars and more than a few missed opportunities. The script provides some good laughs - more than you might expect given its age and demure personality - but the story is too thin and watery to wield much power. Surprising, too, that all the legwork and decision-making falls to the men. This action/adventure fable was famously penned by a woman and boasts a promising female lead, but when push comes to shove, Douglas calls the shots and Turner is just the damsel in distress.