Review:Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

This movie was hard to watch, even for a sequel. Spielberg seemed to lose everything that made the first movie great in such a short time.

The movie opens, not with an exciting archeological find, but with Jones negotiating with Chinese mobsters in a Shanghai nightclub. This whole scene, while amusing at parts, seemed more fitting for a James Bond movie than an Indiana Jones.

The other two primary characters, Short Round and Willie, were two-dimensional, shallow, and largely unnecessary. Short Round was a young orphan Jones saved and let tag along and help on his mission to deal with the mob.While perky and relatively funny, he served almost no purpose except for towards the end of the movie. Willie was a night-club singer in the club where Jones was going through his dealings. She was a bimbo, unhelpful, unproductive, uncatalystic to the story outside of providing a love interest. After the better depth and development Marion had, (and it irked me that she wasn't even mentioned, just vanished) it was disappointing to see such an uninspiring female lead.

To escape the Chinese mob, Jones (taking Willie as a hostage) boards a plane that happens to be owned by the mob. It crashes, and how does our trio save themselves? By jumping into a self-inflating raft, falling a good hundred or more feet, landing safely on snow, rocketing down a mountainside without crashing, off a cliff, dropping even farther down, yet still everyone comes out just a little damp. Um.... what? My suspension of disbelief is straining and we aren't even 20 minutes in.

We then end up in a small village who is suffering greatly because they lost their Mystical Stone of Happy Goodness, but Indy is too busy and needs to get back to the States (subtle foreshadowing is subtle....).

The group continues on and stops at a city that is known for bizarre worship and all kinds of nastiness. Oh, but they don't do that anymore....

While staying the night, we discover that they actually do continue to do bizarre sacrifices, and everyone there is evil. Oh, but their mind control can be broken by touching them with fire. Because this is clearly not an issue in a place lit brightly by torches. You seriously want to tell me that no one ever accidently burned themselves and figured this out before now?

But can Indy and Co escape this cult's vile clutches before the worst happens? To find out you'll have to sit through the crap like I did.

The entire movie is cheap special effects, and a loosely threaded storyline. Worth missing altogether unless you are really wanting to watch the entire Indy saga. But if you skip it, you're not missing much.