[4] The film centers on the protagonist's sexual awakening and her journey around the world to pursue an ideal first lover who will take her virginity.

An orphan heiress to a vast fortune, Ayre is determined to find the right man for her first sexual encounter wherever he might be in the world.

He takes her away in his private airplane to an oasis in the desert, but reveals that while he is a sheik, he was actually raised with an English nanny and educated at Oxford with an interest in poetry.

During this, the Arab sheik flies to Spain to abduct Ayre, but she manages to convince him that she has already lost her virginity and he lets her go.

[7] The quality of Bolero and the other Cannon/MGM films led to Yablans using a breach of contract clause to terminate the distribution deal with Cannon in November 1984.

The website's consensus reads, "Bolero combines a ludicrous storyline and wildly mismatched cast in its desperate attempts to titillate, but only succeeds in arousing boredom".

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film ½ out of four stars, writing: "The real future of Bolero is in home cassette rentals, where your fast forward and instant replay controls will supply the editing job the movie so desperately needs".

[14] David Robinson of The Times said that the story was "the authentic stuff of mild pornography", and wrote that the film's climax "No doubt ... distracted the writer-director from the dialogue, which is in every sense unspeakable.

[17] David Sterritt of The Christian Science Monitor wrote: "This tedious romance ... is a strong candidate for worst picture of the year".