Metacritic-Rezensionen

On the one hand, the action stuff is surprisingly imaginative and well filmed; on the other, the characters are the usual bunch of self-parodic dodoes that the post-Spielberg action cinema has accustomed us to, so it's impossible to believe in the situations anyway.

And that's the problem. Despite strenuous efforts by Herbert Lom and John Rhys-Davies as a pair of comical villains who can't decide whether they are supposed to be funny or menacing, the story is lost in the effects. As Mr. Chamberlain remarks at one threatening moment, ''Boy, looks like they've thought of everything.''

Cannon’s remake of King Solomon’s Mines treads heavily in the footsteps of that other great modern hero, Indiana Jones – too heavily. Where Jones was deft and graceful in moving from crisis to crisis, King Solomon’s Mines is often clumsy with logic, making the action hopelessly cartoonish. Once painted into the corner, scenes don’t resolve so much as end before they spill into the next cliff-hanger.

Not a remake of the Stewart Granger-Deborah Kerr epic, this film has been made, so obviously and calculatedly, to capitalize on the success of ''Raiders of the Lost Ark'' and ''Romancing the Stone,'' seeking their crafty harmony of action, romance and humor. The result is action so ludicrous that it falls consistently between thrilling and amusing and never comes in sufficient amounts of either.

It's stone cold dead on the slab.