My Movie Review on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Greetings, my friends.

This is your jolly film, TV show, and episode reporter here with another review.

Today, I'm gonna give you guys my take of the second film of the Indiana Jones series: "The Temple of Doom".

Here's the summary of it:

Taking place before "Raiders of the Lost Ark", Indiana Jones finds himself embroiled in an adventure in India. Accompanied by a Chinese boy named Short Round and a nightclub singer named Willie Scott, Jones is asked by desperate villagers to retrieve a mystical stone and rescue the village's children from an evil cult.

Will he succeed? Or will he fail?

As I previously stated in my review for "Raiders of the Lost Ark", I had never seen this film at all before deciding to make an analysis of it. Before I watched it while it was on Netflix, though, many of my family members had often voiced their distaste of it. Coming from a guy who finally saw the film for himself, I can hardly blame them.

Much of the fault for it all definitely goes to Steven Spielberg's direction for this movie, the story by George Lucas, and the screenplay by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz.

I will admit that the musical number at the beginning was fun, and there was some snappy dialogue here and there. However, for the very start of this movie, I could hardly make heads or tails on what was going on or what this movie was about. It was largely because the filmmakers didn't give the movie solid ground to help audiences get into it, and the way everything was executed felt like a bunch of scrambled plot pieces. What's more, much of the humor that was incorporated was either witless or mean-spirited, and the dark and violent tone the film had made things unsettling more than entertaining. There were even so many disgusting moments that were awfully disturbing, such as the room full of bugs.

The character of Willie Scott was also what I'd like to call the most pointless addition to the franchise. Minus the big number she led at the intro, she hardly had any meaningful purpose other than to be some soulless combination of an unnecessary comic relief and love interest for Indiana Jones. The amount of screaming, yelling, and whining that she did was annoyingly infuriating, and she was dumb and completely unlikable. Overall, her existence was something I have constantly questioned since seeing the film.

To top it all off, most of the new characters outside of Short Round and Willie were largely unmemorable, and there was hardly much in the ways of character development too.

The one thing I will admit is that there were some elements of the film that I enjoyed.

I literally can't deny that Harrison Ford's performance as Indiana Jones was awesome. Every step of the way, I've noticed how surprisingly committed and into it he was for the role, and he had all of the best lines in the film. Likewise, despite how out of nowhere the character of Short Round was, I enjoyed his lovable personality and presence throughout the movie. The chemistry and bond between Jones and Shorty was also really fun to watch, and pretty much what I'd classify as one of the saving graces.

In the end, "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" isn't something I believe should be wiped out from existence, but...it's not a film that I'd want to go rushing to the store for either.

So, I rate "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" two out of five stars.