80's Watch: Jewel of the Nile (1985)

As Jamie asked:  What is the physics of what's happening here?

Watched:  04/02/2022

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  third?

Director:  Lewis Teague

Woof.

This movie is so bad it has a body count.  No, really.  The last thing in the credits is a "in memory of" and four names scroll by, including the name of Diane Thomas who created Romancing the Stone, of which this is a sequel.

Even as a kid, when I saw The Jewel of the Nile (1985) in the theater, I thought this movie was "not good".  I couldn't have told you why then.  Jamie informs me, when I said "this feels like a cash grab" that it was made incredibly quickly on the heels of Romancing the Stone, and that Kathleen Turner initially refused to do it because the script was so bad.  Y'all, Kathleen Turner is not wrong.  

A weirdly meandering film that just keeps happening, there's essentially a start and an end with no middle during which a bunch of stuff just sort of happens and when our leads are together, they seem like they absolutely *should* part ways as all they can do is argue, it makes the entire third-act rekindling of the romance of the movie make no sense.  But there are multiple scenes in the movie that make no sense but happen just so there's something happening on screen - maybe the greatest example of which is "the chief's son wants to fight Jack so he can court Joan" but the Chief's son is in a hut?  And they just showed up?  And why didn't they just say they were married or betrothed?  Like.  uggghhhhh.

The movie is also about what you'd expect out of a Cold War proxy-war-era American movie with Americans utterly destroying whole African towns with a jet and sheepishly saying "whoops!  Sorry!"  

It will shock no one I was watching Kathleen Turner closely, and her wardrobe isn't even consistent.  She changes shoes, has no shoes, her skirt length changes... Because someone decided Joan should climb mountains in a skirt and flats (though sandals in at least one scene).  And traverse the desert in same.  All of which goes uncommented, which is nuts when you consider her wardrobe was a major issue in the first film.

As a comedy, the pacing is weird and off.  That's an editing problem, perhaps.  Or perhaps the editor only had so much coverage.  I can't say.  But there's a moment at the end that should be funny, revelatory, etc... where we find out the death trap Joan and Jack are in was from her books, and... it lands like just some expository dialog explaining where the trap came from.  The things is, Kathleen Turner is *funny*, and this movie aggressively wants to just make her a prop, and not even a Kathleen Turner-esque prop.  She's just someone named Joan filling space to drive the plot.  

What's absolutely insane is that the guy playing The Jewel (Avner Eisenberg), for whom this was a debut role, basically went on to do nothing else and his last acting credit is the kid's PBS learning show Mathnet in 1992.  But he's five times funnier than everyone else in the film.  Y'all, I have no idea.  

DeVito returns in what's clearly a half-assed beefed-up part to give him screentime, because he has nothing to say or do that has any impact on the film.  He's not with our leads for any significant amount of time, and when he's on his own, he's just muttering to himself.  But he does use the insults "ya dink" and "what a fruit loop" which I miss from the 1980's.  

The sexy, dangerous action of Romancing the Stone is boiled down to the level I expect by a third installment of a series from the 1980's, not a sequel, and not one in such proximity to the original.  There's no pacing, no beats, no appreciation of the leads as everything is almost shot in TV-coverage.  Is this me complaining that I don't get lots of Kathleen Turner in soft lighting?  Yes.  But why am I here elsewise?

Anyway.  This movie killed the franchise and some of the crew while they were scouting locations.  It has weirdly good reviews, which is a tribute to what reviewers were looking for at the time, which may be the afterglow of the first film.  I can't say.  But this is as mediocre a film as I can point to, saved only by some charisma and good comedy chops, but which has just weird, underwritten, goofy scenes that feel more akin to skits than a coherent film.