Prime Time: King Solomon's Mines (1985)

If you’re going to make a movie that hopes to cash in on the success of Indiana Jones then you may as well be as blatant as possible about it. King Solomon’s Mines, based on the old adventure stories by H. Rider Haggard (although I couldn’t say how closely the film resembles them), is about as blatant as can be. That doesn’t matter when the stars get to shine. But there are many sequences when things just aren’t as entertaining as they should be.

Richard Chamberlain is rugged adventurer Allan Quatermain, hired by a woman named Jesse (Sharon Stone) to help find her father. The two travel around Africa, being as respectful and culturally sensitive as you might expect (aka not at all), and they end up heading towards the legendary King Solomon’s Mines, hotly pursued by a man named Dogati (John Rhys-Davies) and a German explorer named Colonel Bochner (Herbert Lom).

Directed by veteran J. Lee Thompson, a man with a filmography crammed full of the kind of movies you may have been forced to watch alongside your grandfather on a Sunday afternoon (hey, I love many of them now, despite slightly resenting them back then), King Solomon’s Mines is, in many ways, enjoyable action fare. The script, by Gene Quintano and James R. Silke, neither of whom seem to have specialized experience in this genre, is crude and clumsy, but there are enough set-pieces dotted throughout to guarantee a certain level of fun. It’s just a shame that you can imagine those set-pieces being improved by the main music from the Indians Jones movies. Or even just featuring Indiana Jones in place of Quatermain. That isn’t the big problem here though. The big problem is a lack of any chemistry between the leads, a lack of any decent characterization for anyone, and nothing to really care about. We’re thrown into the plot with a sequence that allows us to assume some of the backstory, the finale is unsatisfying and unbelievable, so it’s really only the middle section that works as well as it should (especially during a fun action sequence set on a train).

Chamberlain is handsome and charming, which is kind of what he brings to almost every role, and Stone is left to look pretty alongside him, sometimes acting more as the damsel in distress and sometimes being a strong and capable asskicker. It could have been a decent role, but the script leaves her as undeveloped as our hero, only interested in putting them in various perilous situations and then developing some kind of love between the two of them that feels even more fantastical than some of the other plot elements. Rhys-Davies and Lom are fun villains, although the former will keep reminding viewers that you could always just switch this off and revisit those Indiana Jones movies. Ken Gampu and June Buthelezi deserve a mention, playing African characters who are generally treated poorly by the script playing up their “primitive ways”.

If you can look past the rear projection work and the stunt double appearances, there’s some genuinely impressive stuff onscreen at times, from that aforementioned train sequence to a face-off between two airplanes in the sky. There is plenty of dynamite thrown around, some booby traps and big beasties, and even some cannibals that want to boil people in a big pot in a way usually only seen in cartoon depictions of cannibalism.

I doubt anyone involved will look back on this as their best work, even the Jerry Goldsmith score is quite forgettable (although not actually bad), but I hope they don’t view it as their worst. It’s very much of the era, and very much a Cannon film, but it certainly tries to stay entertaining from start to finish.

5/10

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