Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom at 40: Spielberg’s Random Relic | Indiana Jones

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom begins with an action sequence that lasts almost exactly 20 minutes, beginning with a breathtaking East-meets-West rendition of Anything Goes at a Shanghai nightclub in 1935 and ending in the rapids of white water at the foot of the Himalayas. For director Steven Spielberg, whose Raiders of the Lost Ark had been instantly canonized as an all-time great adventure film three years earlier, the only option was to surpass himself, to make a sequel so thrilling and so technically competent that the public be carried away relentlessly. At one point, it literally becomes a roller coaster, with runaway cars going through a mineshaft like Space Mountain.

But the opening action sequence ends. And while there’s a generous lineup of other great set pieces to come, The Temple of Doom must do the dirty business of moving the story forward through colliding characters and cultures, and through the genre of absurdities mythologies that brought together Nazis and religious artifacts in the original. This is where the Temple of Doom got into trouble 40 years ago and still hasn’t quite recovered, despite ample evidence that Spielberg, still at the forefront of Raiders and E.T. -terrestrial, was at the peak of his powers. There are so many criteria for liking the film – Kate Capshaw, “Short Round” and frozen monkey brains just for starters – that it’s almost too exhausting to defend it.

And yet, there is a big, adorable baby in that dirty bath water. The fluidity and visual wit of the Shanghai opening is breathtaking, with Spielberg evoking the choreography of an old Hollywood musical before sliding into a tense confrontation between Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), the club singer night Willie Scott (Capshaw) and a double crossing. the crime boss who owns the club. In the ensuing chaos, the poisoned Indy chases the antidote as he walks away and Willie dives after him, throwing himself toward a large diamond that gets kicked by panicked masses fleeing toward the exit. (When Willie is about to get his hands on the diamond, someone knocks over a bucket of ice.)

Perhaps knowing that he’s being asked to direct the unstoppable heist sequence that sent the Raiders rolling like a large boulder through a trapped Peruvian cave, Spielberg doesn’t stop there. Indy and Willie jump (and through) several awnings and get 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 suspected escape from a cargo plane, which then leads to another double-crossing and an emergency parachute drop down a mountainside in an inflatable raft, which then leads to another parachute drop from a cliff into the wild. waters below. It’s one of the best sequences of Spielberg’s career and a great example of an action sequel that succeeds by turning up the volume. Same thing again, but more.

And yet, just as Indy’s inflatable raft must ultimately descend back to earth, so too does Temple of Doom, landing hard in a reckless mix of leaden romance, gross-out comedy, and a level of cultural insensitivity that veers into the grotesque. There’s a certain degree of caricature in Spielberg and George Lucas’s revival of old-fashioned adventure series, as a dashing American grave robber snatches powerful relics from the hands of various global evildoers. But once this film arrives at Pankot Palace in India, where Thuggee cultists have taken a precious stone from a village and enslaved its children, the whole ordeal seems disgusting on both sides: a village so helpless that he needs a white American to save him and a scene at the palace that seems barbaric from dinner time to a mass ritual of human sacrifice.

Capshaw took the brunt of criticism for his 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 endless litany of complaints. (Her chipped fingernails become a running joke.) Even when Indy and Short Round are about to be crushed by a spiked ceiling that slowly descends on their heads, she makes her way to the trigger mechanism like a guest preparing a lengthy one-star review of Palais Pankot on Yelp. She hates exotic food, elephants and the “living beings” that harass her in the jungle. Not all of Indy’s romantic interests need to be Karen Allen’s two-fisted, two-fisted Marion in Raiders, but a little of his resilience might have helped.

And yet, despite a second act so unpleasant that it prompted the creation of the PG-13 rating, Temple of Doom recovers with more Spielberg magic over time, as Indy and company flee the high priest Thuggee Mola Ram (an excellent Amrish Puri). and his followers through the mines and over a rope bridge that spans a giant crevasse. As in the film’s opening, Spielberg again connects multiple set pieces into one continuous action sequence, the rope bridge in particular recalling the half-suspense/half-comedy stunts of a Buster Keaton comedy. There’s no fun in Ram ripping a victim’s beating heart out of his chest, but there’s plenty of fun in him throwing his own men at Indy in the hopes that both will be fed to the alligators below.

In its best moments, The Temple of Doom plays like Spielberg’s crack at a modern-day Gunga Din, suffering a bit of friction due to tensions within British India while showcasing the imposing terrain and swaggering heroes who try to prosper there. But the problem with the film is that it eventually has to pause to catch its breath and nothing good comes from a 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 resurrect a dead shark.