A colourful slice of escapism that's so likeable and fast-moving that you often forget how silly it all is.

Kathleen Turner, Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito all boosted their careers with larger-than-life performances in the kind of film that French director Philippe de Broca used to make with that stunt-minded actor Jean-Paul Belmondo in the 1960s.

These days, all pretences towards reality and conviction have been tossed away in this kind of romp, but Turner's sympathetic performance as beleaguered authoress Joan Wilder helps a lot as she is hauled out to a sea of mud and the tropical storms in the Colombian outback to rescue her kidnapped sister, by yielding up the treasure map sent to her by her sister's dead husband.

In South America, she's saved by Jack Colton (Douglas) who, while having an eye on the treasure map, is the amalgam of all the romantic heroes of her own fiction.

Their subsequent hunt for the treasure might be even more fun if the villains weren't so intentionally comic, but we should still be grateful to director Robert Zemeckis and his actors for such non-stop action entertainment.