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Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom begins with an action sequence that’s almost exactly 20 minutes long, starting with a show-stopping east-meets-west rendition of Anything Goes at a Shanghai nightclub in 1935 and ending in the whitewater rapids at the foot of the Himalayas. For the director Steven Spielberg, whose Raiders of the Lost Ark had instantly been canonized as an all-time great adventure movie only three years before, the only option was to top himself, to make a sequel so breathlessly paced and technically proficient that audiences would be whisked along relentlessly. At one point, it literally becomes a rollercoaster ride, with runaway cars zipping through a mine shaft like Space Mountain.
But the opening action sequence does end. And while there’s a generous array of other outstanding set pieces to come, The Temple of Doom has to do the ugly business of moving the story forward through characters and cultures colliding, and through the sort of mythological nonsense that brought Nazis and religious artefacts together in the original. This is where The Temple of Doom got itself into trouble 40 years ago and still hasn’t quite recovered, despite ample evidence that Spielberg, still hot off Raiders and ET the Extra-Terrestrial, was at the peak of his powers. There are so many qualifiers to liking the film – Kate Capshaw, “Short Round” and chilled monkey brains just for starters – that it’s almost too exhausting to defend.
And yet there’s a big, lovable baby in that all filthy bathwater. The fluidity and visual wit of the opening in Shanghai is breathtaking, with Spielberg evoking the choreography of an Old Hollywood musical before slipping into a tense confrontation between Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), the nightclub singer Willie Scott (Capshaw) and a double-crossing crime boss who owns the club. In the chaos that follows, a poisoned Indy chases the antidote as it skitters away and Willie dives after him, lunging toward a large diamond that gets kicked around by panicked masses fleeing toward the exit. (When Willie nearly gets her hands on the diamond, someone knocks over a bucket of ice.)
Perhaps knowing that he’s being asked to top the un-toppable heist sequence that got Raiders rolling like a large boulder in a booby-trapped Peruvian cave, Spielberg doesn’t stop there. Indy and Willie leap down (and through) multiple awnings and into a car driven by Short Round (Ke Huy Quan), a scrappy young orphan who Indy has turned into a sidekick. A chase through the streets of Shanghai leads to a presumed escape by a freight plane, which then leads to another double-cross and an emergency drop on to a mountainside in an inflatable raft, which then leads into another drop off a cliff into the raging waters below. It’s among the best sequences of Spielberg’s career, and a prime example of an action sequel that succeeds by turning up the volume. More of the same, only more.
And yet, just as Indy’s inflatable raft has to come down to earth eventually, so does Temple of Doom, landing hard in an ill-considered mix of leaden romance, gross-out comedy and a level of cultural insensitivity that edges into the grotesque. There’s a degree of cartoonishness baked into Spielberg and George Lucas’s revival of old-fashioned adventure serials, as a dashing American tomb raider snatches powerful relics from the hands of various global evil-doers. But once this film lands in Pankot Palace in India, where Thuggee cultists have taken a precious stone from a village and enslaved its children, the entire ordeal feels icky on both ends: a village so helpless that it needs a white American to save it and a scene at the palace that seems barbaric from dinnertime to a mass ritual of human sacrifice.
Capshaw has taken the brunt of criticism for her grating performance as Willie, but it’s hard to know how anyone could play a character conceived as a helpless diva who counters Indy’s masculine gift with an unending litany of complaints. (Her chipped nails become a running joke.) Even when Indy and Short Round are about to be crushed by a spiked ceiling slowing descending on their heads, she bellyaches her way to the trigger mechanism like a guest preparing a lengthy one-star review of Pankot Palace on Yelp. She hates exotic food, elephants and “living things” that hassle her in the jungle. Not all of Indy’s romantic interests need to be Karen Allen’s hard-drinking, two-fisted Marion in Raiders, but a sliver of her resilience might have helped.
And yet, despite a second act so unpleasant that it spurred the creation of the PG-13 rating, Temple of Doom recovers with more Spielberg magic down the stretch, as Indy and company flee the Thuggee high priest Mola Ram (an excellent Amrish Puri) and his followers through the mines and across a rope bridge that spans a giant crevasse. As in the film’s opening, Spielberg again links multiple set pieces into one continuous action sequence, with the rope bridge in particular recalling the half-suspenseful/half-comic stunts of a Buster Keaton comedy. There’s no fun in Ram clawing a victim’s beating heart out of his chest, but lots of fun in him slinging his own men at Indy in the hope that both will get fed to the alligators below.
In its best moments, The Temple of Doom plays like Spielberg’s crack at a modern-day Gunga Din, getting a little friction from the tensions within British India while playing up the imposing terrain and the swashbuckling heroes trying to thrive in it. But the trouble with the film is that it has to pause for breath eventually and nothing good comes out of any break in the action. It may be a myth that sharks die when they stop moving, but here the director of Jaws keeps having to resuscitate a dead shark.