Review of Romancing the Stone (1984) by Thomas K — 08 Aug 2014

Diane Thomas's only produced screenplay before she died in a car crash in 1985 is a good one and in Kathleen Turner she got the perfect heroine. Turner plays an inhibited romance novelist whose sister is kidnapped in Columbia and when she goes to Columbia to save her she runs into the man she has been writing about in her novels, and they have one hell of an adventure.

This was Zemeckis' first major hit and he mostly does a hell of a good job. The sequel, unfortunately, did not live up to the promise here but Joan Wilder is still one great protagonist and it was nice to see a woman at the center of one of these films.

The biggest fault is Michael Douglas' Jack T. Colton, who seems like a stand in for the romantic lead. He's really no more than serviceable but he doesn't really need to be more than that.