Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. - If Adventure had a name, it would change it.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - Gross Encounters of the Third Kind.


I guess even Steven Spielberg can drop a bomb now and then, in fact, I know he can.

As much as it hurts me to be critical of a movie series I like, like a Star Wars or a Star Trek, it hurts me equally to criticize an Indiana Jones movie. Because Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade were such good movies. What the hell happened to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which I will from this point on refer to as TOD for short?

TOD starts out well enough, with the typical "Indy gets into and out of a tight spot and escapes from the bad guys in a plane/train situation". Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) and Nightclub singer, Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) must recover a diamond and an antidote for some poison that Indy has been slipped, all while be shot at with machine guns and attacked by various thugs and dancing girls and large gongs. They get away and are rescued by "Short Round" (Ke Huy Quan).

The opening danger/escape all works as well as it did in Raiders, however it's slightly after the escape that TOD goes terrible wrong. Because unlike in Raiders and Last Crusade where the danger/escape scene is simply a warm-up for the real story, in TOD, the story never really gets going and the characters just wander aimlessly looking for trouble. Such as when the escape plane Indy and gang choose just happens to belong to the bad guy they were escaping from. This leads to one of the most implausible and unlikely escapes in movie history, which involves a crashing plane, an inflatable raft, a snowy peak and a river. I won't bore you with the details, the movie can do that for you, suffice to say, it's about as ridiculous and unsurvivable a sequence as you are likely to see.

However our heroes do survive somehow and set out aimlessly wandering about some continent, I suppose it could be Asia. All along the way Willie Scott screams at spiders and snakes and runs around like some sort of beta-version Jar-Jar Binks. They eventually meet up with some villagers who have had their magic rocks stolen, along with all their children, by a cult of Thuggees lead by spooky Mola Ram (Amrish Puri). Indy agrees to look for the magic rocks and sets out with his gang. They eventually stumble upon a palace and are invited in for some gross-out food. In fact, grossing out the audience is a recurring theme in TOD, lots of gross-outs. Lots of bugs and goat's eyes and monkey brains and extreme heartburn.

Indy is captured by the Thuggees and taken to the Temple of Doom, where Mola Ram performs some impromptu mystical heart surgery and breaks some child labor laws. Indy is eventually rescued by Jar-Jar and Anakin, I mean by Willie Scott and Short Round. Indy frees the villagers kids, snatches the magic rocks, there is a big mining car chase/roller-coaster, then another unlikely escape. Then it just goes on about 30 more minutes and ends. There is no big finish, no melting heads, just "here are your stupid rocks, now take better care of them this time."

TOD, by the way is a PREQUEL to Raiders of the Lost Ark, not a sequel, which was disappointing. But one thing I've learned is that "prequel" and "disappointment" kind of go hand-in-hand.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom seems rushed and hurried, without much of a plot and very little character development. Much of the film is just images meant to be gross/scary and Willie Scott screaming. Maybe Spielberg wanted to cash in on Raiders while he had his momentum going. Actually, since George Lucas is credited as the writer on TOD, I suppose he gets the blame for the lack of story. It's clear that he just didn't have his heart in it.