A bad sequal and a great original involving a stone and a jewel, and Turner!

Romance and the Stone (1983) and The Jewel of the Nile (1985) stars Mike Douglas (also producer), Kathleen Turner (such a silky husky voice, mmmmm), and Danny Devito (Rhea Pearlman's husband).  The idea of the first movie is that Turner is a romance writer and she has to go to Columbia to rescue her sister.  She's a New York City shut-in so it's a fish-out-of-water story.  She meets Douglas and together they get into trouble and along with Devito as a crook, they compete to get a famous emerald.   The sequal has Turner and Douglas in a tropical location (because of course they shack up) and she decides to take a break from them and goes off with a dictator of an African nation.  Since he's a dictator he's an ass, goes without saying (right?) and Douglas and Devito decide to rescue her and seek out the mythical jewel at the same time. 

RATS is the better movie and if you pick one of the two, this is the one to watch.  It is from a firs time screen writer who hit the script out of the park.  Diane Thomas declined to write the second one and it shows.  (She died shortly after the sequal was released.)  She is the one who made action movies with strong female leads a thing.  Without her there may never have been action movies with female heroes.  It also helps that she wrote real charecters that are relatable and believable and it helps when your script is helmed by pre-Back to the Future Robert Zemeckis although he isn't really an auteur as much as he's a really good everyman's director.  His, along with Diane's abscence from the sequal are noticed.

JOTN has a lot of dancing and scene fillers.  There's still plenty of action but there's a lot more scenes when nothing happens.  At best those scenes could be called mood setters but it's likely they are filler to stretch the movie out and cash in on the success of the first movie.  The one bright spot is (spoiler alert) the clown they hired to play the jewel (he's a mystic).  The actors do what they can with the script which isn't bad but there wasn't a lot to do with these guys that wasn't done in the first one.  This, along with Beverly Hills Cop 2 showed Hollywood that audiences don't want more of the same, which is what this movie is, more of the same. 

Kudos to Kathleen Turner.  What a sexy voice!  She could melt butter just by speaking.