The Jewel of the Nile (1985)

The Jewel of the Nile arrives in 1985 as a contractual obligation wearing the costume of a lark. Kathleen Turner, by her own later account, found the script terrible, formulaic and sentimental, and only the threat of a twenty-five million dollar lawsuit persuaded her aboard. Michael Douglas, producing and starring, cared more. The resulting picture sends its novelist heroine to a fictional African desert to write the biography of a charming ruler who turns out to be a brutal dictator, and the machinery of the thing grinds along on chases, explosions and a wooden F-16 built over a Chevrolet chassis.

Joan Wilder remains nominally the hero, a successful writer with a bestseller and a sailboat, but the film keeps misplacing her. She is kidnapped, escorted, captured, cornered atop burning scaffolding and finally married by a holy man in the closing minutes. The picture has no interest in interrogating any of this. Its Arab world is assembled from the usual warehouse: a duplicitous dignitary, a mystical Sufi who walks unharmed through fire, an exotic desert, a prophecy. The region's inhabitants are played by a Greek leading man and a company of American stage performers. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus concedes that the stereotypes have grown, which is a polite way of saying the film treats an entire region as set dressing. Nobody involved appears to have noticed. Nobody involved appears to have been asked.

Elsewhere the ledger is nearly blank. There is no romance beyond the reuniting of two leads, no economic grievance, no environmental conscience, no interest whatsoever in instructing its audience. The villain wants power, not profit, and the film is content to let him want it. The remainder is a competently mounted adventure that killed its own franchise, dedicated to three people who did not live to see it open, and remembered chiefly for a Billy Ocean single. It means no harm. It also means very little.