Temple of Doom Review

One word comes to mind after watching Temple of Doom. Racist. No, actually three. Racist, sexist, cash-grab. The last one was hyphenated, but you get the point. Even with the great world building set up in Raiders of the Lost arc, Temple of Doom throws all of that away. While Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones is great (as always), the rest of the cast of characters just aren’t good. The sidekicks feature the young short round, a want-to-be Indiana Jones that is a huge Chinese stereotype. On the other hand there’s the singer, I forget her name because she’s completely irrelevant to the story. She spends the entire time screaming and pouring “expensive” perfume on an elephant. This is nothing like Raiders. The cast of characters all had a very good reason to be there, and had a very independent style of voice. Temple of Doom feels like it was written over the course of a week. The structure just doesn’t work, if anything, it feels more like an 80s video game where you have to escape the evil temple of native people, scary. Now, don’t get me completely wrong, the action in this is fun. Steven Spielberg and John Williams still have their moments to shine, but it just seems lacking everything that made Raiders such a charming film. Really, you could tell that the studio was trying… to make money. 5.7/10