Fortune and Boring: The sad truth about Temple of Doom

From the moment the Paramount logo fades into a mountainous design on a giant gong, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom starts to disappoint. As is the case with many sequels, IJATTOD attempts to be bigger than its predecessor in almost everyway. After all, the characters have already been established and now the true fun can begin. This can lead to greatness (The Empire Strikes Back, a movie that George Lucas is intimately familiar with, being an excellent example) or it can create a bit of a mess. IJATTOD is the latter. It is such a mess, in fact, that it can almost be seen as the antithesis of Raiders of the Lost Ark; what made that movie great makes this movie dreck.

Let’s begin with the plot. IJATROTLA had a simple story that was full of possibilities. The concept of Nazis trying to find the Ark of the Covenant (which Dr. Jones reminds us holds the Ten Commandments, in case you skipped Hebrew School) is set up in the first act and the through line of the picture is established. The plot of IJATTOD takes far longer to reveal itelf and once revealed it is not that impressive. Here is the story in a nutshell:

Indiana Jones, along with his tween chauffer Short Round and lounge singer Willie Scott (played by Ke Huy Quan and Kate Capshaw), find himself in an impoverished village in remote India. Indy agrees to find a sacred stone and the village's missing children. The stones and children are in the hands of a high priest who can rip your heart out through your body cavity.

There is not much urgency in this plotline because the complexity of the story’s mysticism (which seems to be a bastardization of actual Hindu beliefs) needs constant explanation by the characters along the way. The most frustrating part is that there existed real villains in 1930s India in the form of the British colonials. Why invent a group of priests who force Indian children to labor their lives away when the British were actually doing it? Imagine it: Indy could go into the titular temple expecting crazy Indian witch doctors only to find Brits who had stolen the stones and were using them to control the colony. This would have proved to be a far more simple (and compelling) storyline to convey. It could have also kept the film from being labeled at least stereotypical, if not downright racist.

As with IJATROLA, the filmmakers celebrate the cinema of the 1930s. Instead of saluting film noir and slapstick, Lucas and Spielberg have infused IJATTOD with elements of films from the early age of color movies. The opening (with Kate Capshaw singing “Anything Goes” in Chinese) is straight out of a Busby Berkeley musical, but it goes too far. The dancers break out of reality and strut their stuff on some magic dance floor that is clearly not in the restaurant where the film began. Then they are back. It is as if the film has jumped the shark before we even see Indiana Jones. The other major influence appears to be the “Sword and Sandals” epics of the time. This leads to a little more fun (and a lot more bare chested Harrison Ford). However, the whole thing is bathed in garish lighting possibly meant to evoke the brilliance of those early color films (filmmakers doing their first work in color went, understandably, overboard in the use of hues). Raiders of the Lost Ark was shot almost like a black and white film, to beautiful effect, the look here cheapens the entire picture.

A classic move for a sequel is to provide the protagonist with a sidekick. This is dangerous territory (there is a reason all the good Batman movies are the ones without Robin). In IJATTOD, Indiana Jones has been saddled with not one, but two, sidekicks in the form of Willie Scot and Short Round. Both performers seem to have gone to the “hit one note repeatedly” school of acting and their skills are on full display here. Capshaw is by far the more annoying of the two. Her prissy lady in the jungle shtick is supposed to give her relationship with Indy a African Queen vibe, instead it lands somewhere south of Green Acres. Her motivations are completely implausible (no human, no matter how greedy, still gets excited about diamonds right after seeing a man get his heart ripped out of his chest) and her tone of voice is excruciating. Short Round is grating (you can see the genesis of Jar Jar Binks in the role) but it is possible to see where an interesting relationship between the orphan and his archeologist father figure could have developed. The time that could have been spent developing that relationship, however, is filled with endless one liners screamed in adorable broken English.

It is not as if IJATTOD is utterly without merit. Harrison Ford is still grizzled swagger incarnate and the climactic scene on the world’s most unsafe rope bridge is gripping. However, the film falls so far short of the intent and execution of its predecessor that it is hard to keep these positives in perspective. Of course Temple of Doom was a smash success at the box office regardless and you know what that means: a third installment was released five years later. But that is a story for another day. How about tomorrow?