Review of Romancing the Stone (1984) by Jake C — 23 Oct 2018

With one of the great fake-out openings, the movie starts out on clever, sly, fresh footing-but quickly slips into more generic fare, losing sight of the wink to the audience with which the movie started.

The idea of a romance novelist getting swept up in the sort of adventure she would usually write about and being, at first at least, not up to the challenge at all, is smartly ironic, as is centering an Indiana-Jones-esque treasure hunt in a woman's perspective, but that angle more or less gives way once Douglas takes over and the movie shifts gears into a more straightforward romance.

In that way, it is a genre send-up that wants to eat its cake and have it too, which ends up being wasteful instead of tasteful-just take the objet a itself, which serves as a vanishing mediator to fix together the standard heterosexual couple, but which nonetheless gets recovered in the end because the movie wants things both ways and so ends up not offering much in return.