Mark Harrison | On 29, Jun 2023

What can we say about Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom that it doesn’t say itself with its bold choice of old-timey opening musical number? There’s black magic, human sacrifice, magic stones, secret passages, absurd cuisine, extreme (airborne) rafting – and that’s just for starters, because this time, “Anything Goes”.
 
Accordingly, the Indy prequel is a messier, gnarlier, and all-round freakier follow-up, made out of unused ideas and set-pieces from Raiders of the Lost Ark and a prevailing darkness of humour. It’s an exploitation movie for kids, with all the frantic pacing, horrific violence and, yes, actual child exploitation that implies.
 
Set in 1935, a year before Raiders, the film kicks off with a thrilling James Bond-inspired Shanghai nightclub prologue and crash-lands in India, where the Thuggee cult are using kidnapped children to locate the five sacred Sankara stones from Hindu mythology. With junior sidekick Short Round (Ke Huy Quan) and hysterical club singer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) in tow, Indy stumbles into a terrifying battle with evil high priest Mola Ram (Amrish Puri) and his followers.
 
Notorious as one of two Steven Spielberg-backed 1984 movies that spurred the introduction of the American PG-13 rating (the other was Gremlins), Temple of Doom dispenses with the Nazis as villains, but steps up the violence and the horror, but also the mean-spiritedness, whether intentional or not.
 
Because unavoidably, the film isn’t just problematic by today’s standards – it was indefensibly racist at the time too. Raiders screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan opted out of taking the series in a darker direction, so writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz (who previously wrote American Graffiti and later wrote Howard the Duck) are on scripting duties.
 
Like George MacDonald Fraser on the previous year’s James Bond film, Octopussy, the duo were apparently hired for their knowledge of India. But, as in Octopussy, there’s little evidence that anyone involved in the production had any cultural engagement whatsoever. Where the other Indiana Jones movies have a romantic affection for serial adventures, this seems composed of half-remembered bits from the 1939 film Gunga Din among other colonial presumptions. As represented here, it’s little wonder the Indian government refused permission for Spielberg et al to film in their country.
 
On the intentional side of things, this is still a mixed bag. Where the other Indiana Jones films have a romantic, somewhat nostalgic remembrance of the serials that inspired it, this goes meaner and moodier and scarier. The increased horror element makes this unique in the series, but both Spielberg and Lucas have attributed the bad attitudes of this one to issues in their personal lives around the same time.

The most obvious effect is its more dispassionate approach. Spielberg has gone one further and said there isn’t an ounce of his own personal feeling in Temple of Doom and he was more a director for hire. You can understand why he wants to distance himself from bits of this, but there’s no shaking how he executes the flawed material in a no-less spectacular fashion. The mine-cart chase is just one of the sequences that would rank in any list of the director’s greatest set-pieces.
 
Plus, despite the film’s dark heart, it’s arguably the best-looking Indiana Jones movie, with returning cinematographer Douglas Slocombe shooting the heck out of it and straight-up casting hellfire across all of the most frightening sequences.
 
Fans are often divided on the supporting characters in this one too. Willie is an obnoxious, screeching damsel-in-distress, but Kate Capshaw gets plenty of latitude to show off her comedy chops along the way. For our money, Ke Huy Quan’s Short Round is the shining light here; an irrepressible child actor who’s put through the wringer like everyone and everything else in this instalment but comes out with an infectious grin anyway.
 
And underrated in all this is Indy’s arc. As a prequel, the film doesn’t have a ton of leeway for character development, so it takes him at least two steps back instead. Given shades of light and dark to play, Ford’s performance travels from amoral tuxedoed racketeering at the start, to the punch-the-air heroic epiphany he has at the climax: “Let’s get out of here… All of us.” To an extent, this one’s about him evolving from the asshole we’ve heard about to the anti-hero we know in Raiders.
 
In this context, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is the proverbial “shadowy reflection” of Raiders that Belloq claims he is to Indy in the original. It’s fast and furious and frightening and most certainly not everybody’s cup of tea. While the peerless action filmmaking on display can never excuse some of its bigger missteps, it remains, at worst, a thrilling lapse into exploitation.

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