Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Welcome to part two of my trek covering the four Indiana Jones movies! If you missed out my first entry, then please click here to check out my take on Raiders of the Lost Ark. Today I am covering the second film, 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Rope-Bridge Temple of Doom (trailer). Like Raiders, I only had a couple brief memories of the Temple of Doom’s most iconic scenes from my childhood (those being the rope-bridge and gross dinner scenes) and had no idea how it would hold up. I only knew going into this that it was a prequel taking place one year before Raiders in 1935 and that it was darker in tone which resulted in the creation of the PG-13 rating.

I thought there would be some key scenes here with this being a prequel that there would be some foreshadowing to the upcoming events in Raiders, but that is not the case because minus a couple subtle references, Temple completely stands on its own. I was optimistic going into the start of this film because the opening scene is executed wonderfully with a diamond exchange at a club in Shanghai going terribly wrong and Indy (Harrison Ford) going on a swashbuckling chase to procure the diamond and get the hell out of dodge. Indy eventually finds himself in India where the locals send him on a quest to retrieve their beloved Sankara Stones that were taken from them.

I should have known better to get my hopes up because said opening scene also introduces the love interest Willie (Kate Capshaw) and Indy’s sidekick boy wonder, Shorty (Jonathan Ke Quan). This duo accompanies Indy throughout the film, and provides nonstop cringe-worthy comic relief throughout. Maybe their zingers were passable for 1984, but most of their lines are the bad type of cheesy that made Temple ultimately a chore to get through. Willie has several ‘broken nail’ and ‘damsel in distress’ moments and is a polar 180 from the charismatic tomboy Marion of Raiders while Shorty relies on eyebrow-raising high-pitch shouts of ‘Indyyyy’ and countless other low-brow cheap laughs (the dinner scene is absolutely littered with them) throughout.

Director, Steven Spielberg relied on Willie and Shorty’s jokes too much in the opening hour and change because when the film does take a darker tone with some intense torture scenes, it proved difficult to wrap my head around the sudden tone shift because I was conditioned into expecting more ha-ha humor from Shorty & Willie. Things finally pick up in the final 20-ish minutes with a gripping mine-cart chase and the epic dangling rope-bridge of DOOM!!! That scene was likely the catalyst for me being petrified of heights and it taking longer than I care to admit to overcome. The final scenes helped saved Temple of Doom from being a total flop; as a whole it still proves to be a far weaker film when compared to Raiders.

While Raiders had three near hour-long making of features on the BluRay box set bonus disc, Temple only has one Making of special clocking in at 41 minutes. Definitely check it out though because there is a ton of worthwhile factoids to consume in new interviews from the cast and crew. Some key nuggets that stood out were George Lucas & Spielberg stating the main reason for the existence of Temple was because they had to so many stunt scenes out of Raiders that they had enough stunts for the sequel. As much as I disliked Kate Capshaw’s character, her interviews did provide some entertaining stories on learning how to properly scream and how she came to terms filming with snakes on the film. They do explain how they asked the MPAA for creation of a different rating in-between PG & R but that it took the MPAA a few months after Temple hit theaters for it to go into effect with Red Dawn being the first PG-13 film. I want to give props to Harrison Ford for roughing out the filming of this after I discovered in the doc he suffered a herniated disc that lead to him being off the shoot for six weeks!

After watching this I asked a couple friends I recall that are big Indiana Jones fans where they would rank Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and their sentiments echoed mine with it being the weak link of the original trilogy. It is not a total wash because the first 10 minutes and final 20 minutes provide quality entertainment, but the rest in-between is not worth your time whatsoever….at least we got a killer rope-bridge scene.

Other Random Backlog Movie Blogs

3
12 Angry Men (1957)
12 Rounds 3: Lockdown
21 Jump Street
Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie
Atari: Game Over
The Avengers: Age of Ultron
Batman: The Killing Joke
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice
Bounty Hunters
Cabin in the Woods
Captain America: Civil War
Captain America: The First Avenger
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Christmas Eve
Clash of the Titans (1981)
Clint Eastwood 11-pack Special
The Condemned 2
Countdown
Creed
Deck the Halls
Dredd
The Eliminators
The Equalizer
Dirty Work
Faster
Fast and Furious I-VIII
Field of Dreams
Fight Club
The Fighter
For Love of the Game
Good Will Hunting
Gravity
Guardians of the Galaxy
Hercules: Reborn
Hitman
Indiana Jones 1-4
Ink
The Interrogation
Interstellar
Jobs
Joy Ride 1-3
Man of Steel
Man on the Moon
Marine 3-5
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
Mortal Kombat
National Treasure
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
The Replacements
Reservoir Dogs
Rocky I-VII
Running Films Part 1
Running Films Part 2
San Andreas
ScoobyDoo Wrestlemania Mystery
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Shoot em Up
Steve Jobs
Source Code
Star Trek I-XIII
Take Me Home Tonight
TMNT
The Tooth Fairy 1 & 2
UHF
Veronica Mars
Vision Quest
The War
Wild
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The Wrestler (2008)
X-Men: Days of Future Past