J. Lee Thompson directs Richard Chamberlain, Sharon Stone and John Rhys-Davies in this Cannon Group cheapie epic that takes a classic adventure tale and amps up anything that resembles the Indiana Jones franchise they can afford to rip off.

Even as an impressionable child I knew this couldn’t hold a candle to Raiders, or even Romancing the Stone, but it has matured surprisingly well. OK in dialogue, plotting and invention the script lacks ambition, I even doubt the writers can spell ‘ambition’. But they knew what pages of the Temple of Doom shooting script to photocopy and what pages of Haggard’s original novel to cut and paste in, so… well done them. The low budget antics of the shoot only really show themselves up in the early interiors and once we hit the locations (and the ‘just happy to be there’ cast of thousands locals) the scale and dangerous looking practical stunt work is now quite comparatively epic in scope if not imagination, especially when you consider the money squandered on passionless greenscreen and graphics these days. I’m not going to make the argument that this is a good film but it is a consistently undemanding fun one that frames its artless cliffhangers, just the right side of racist exoticism (and only “just”), a hungry young starlet in the shape of Sharon Stone and a game villian perpetuated by Rhys-Davies well enough that you admire the romp rather than execution. You won’t have a blast but this kicks up enough dust to kill an evening pleasurably.

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