So now onto the second part of my posts on the Indiana Jones adventures, which will cover Indian Jones and the Temple of Doom. After the big success of the first film, Temple of doom, was a much anticipated sequel (or prequel really as it turned out) and for the most part it didn't disappoint although at the time of release it wasn't quite as well received as Raiders was. But anyway more on that later, let's have the usual look at it....
Wellllll, the story begins in 1935 in Shanghai (set a year before Raiders) where Indy (Harrison Ford) encounters Chinese crime boss, Lao Che (Roy Chiao) in a nightclub, where he does a deal for a diamond and to give Lae the ashes of a former Chinese emperor. However Lao poisons Indy's drink and taunts him with the antitode, and forces him into giving back his diamond, Indy then kills one Lao's sons, and a big fight ensues, where Indy ends up fleeing with an American nightclub singer, Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) by diving out a window, and they both crash into a car driven by Indy's 11 year old sidekick, Short Round (Johnathan Ke Quan) who is outside waiting for them. They escape the clutches of Lao's men and make it onto a plane and escape as Lao arrives on the scene, but unknown to Indy, the plane is owned by Lao's airline. Once in the air, the pilots (who work for Lao) quietly jump out the plane using parachutes to leave the plane to crash into the Himalayas. Indy, Willie and Short Round barely escape death by using a lifeboat they dive out of the plane, and land in the rough waters, but they eventually come to rest in the river of a poor desolate village in India, where they are met by an old Indian man, Shaman. Shaman takes them into his village, which is run down and the villagers are starving as their crops have dried out, and they are missing a sacred stone, which would bring vitality to their village again, and also their children have been taken away for slave labour to a place called Pankot palace. The Shaman asks Indy for his help in finding the sacred stone and freeing the children, to which Indy soon agrees to and takes a reluctant Willie, and Short Round with him.
On arriving at Pankot, Indy, Willie and Shorty (to abbreviate!) are given a warm welcome by the Prime Minister of the Maharaja of Pankot, Chattar Lal (Roshan Seth) who invites to a palace banquet. At the banquet, Indy meets the Maharaja (Raj Singh) who is just a 13 year old boy, and the food at the banquet is a rather bizzare mix of animal feasts such as baby snakes, monkey brains, large beetles and eyeball soup (yeucch!). After the banquet is over, Indy and Willie start to show a bit of a spark as they share a kiss, but Willie is annoyed by Indy's arrogance and tells him to get out. Back in his room Indy is nearly killed by a palace guard who tries to garrot him, by Indy manages to kill him with his whip and hang him from a ceiling fan. Indy races back into Willie's room (who thinks he is back for a bit of lovin!) and checks around it and soon finds a secret passage way that leads into a series of tunnels. Indy and Shorty check out the passage and find it is covered in bugs, and they end up unwittingly in a trap room, with some spikes coming out ceiling and the roof slowly coming down on them. Willie reluctantly braving the bug infested passageway, goes in and saves Indy and Short from being squished by releasing a trap door lever the raises the ceiling again, and let's them out.
Indy, Willie and Shorty then progress through undergound tunnels and soon come to a temple, where they see a Thugee cult ceremony take place, lead by the high priest Mola Ram (Amrish Puri) who performs a human sacrifice to the Hindu goddess, Kali, by ripping out the heart of a sacrificia victim, who they cast into a lava pit. After the sacrifice we see that the cult have three of the five Sankara stones, and once the ceremony is finished, Indy makes his way down and takes the stones, but he and the others are soon captured. Mola Ram forces Indy to see his view point, which is that he wants to recover all five Sankara stones, so the Thugee cult can rule the world, with the children taken from the village, being used as slave labour to mine for the missing two stones. As for Willie, she is set to be sacrificed, and Shorty is put down in the mines to work, and Indy is forced to drink the blood of Kali, which puts him in a trance state, where he obeys Mola Ram and follows Kali without question. Indy still in the trance, seals Willie in the cage to be lowered into the lava pit, and Shorty, who manages to escape the mines, eventually saves Indy, by purging his trance like state, with fire. After this Indy's conscious is restored and he rescues Willie and fights off the guards, and then sets about freeing the children from the mines, by knocking out the guards, but he ends up in a big fight with one of the head guards (played by Pat Roach). To make matters worse, the Maharaja, who is also under the influence of Kali, uses a voodoo doll of Indy and a knife to twist in, to wrack Indy in pain. But Shorty saves the day by fighting off the Maharaja, and restoring him to normal by using fire as well. After this Indy, Willie and Shorty escape into the mines on a mine cart, only to be given chase by Mola Ram's guards, who they manage to evade. However Mola Ram has his guards break down the dam in the temple, which floods the tunnels with water, and pretty soon it catches up with Indy and his pals, but they manage to escape outside and climb up to the mountain top, and cross an old ropey bridge, where they encounter Mola Ram for the last time........
The temple of doom is undoubtedly a very entertaining ride, and Steven Spielberg manages to keep the action thick and fast, even more so here than in Raiders. Although it does have to be said the violence in the film is pretty strong stuff, and there were several scenes that were also censored in the UK cinema release and even on DVD, most notably the scene where Mola Ram rips the heart out of the sacrificial victim and we see him being cast into the pit catching fire, as well as Indy being viciously whipped and beaten up by Mola Ram's main guard. It is pretty strong stuff for a PG rated film at the time, and it acutally pre-empted the creation of the American censor board's PG-13 certificate (as well as Gremlins did at that time also), the film also since has been released on Blu-ray in the UK and now has a 12 certificate.
But none of this takes away from the sheer fun and entertainment than Temple of Doom offers, and there is plenty of that on display. There is a good sense of fun throughout the movie, and yeah ok there are one or two annoying scenes, particularly where Short round says some cringeworthy things such as "Holy smoke, Dr Jones! Crash landing!", and "Ok dokey, Dr Jones, hold onto your potatos!". But at the same time Shorty does have quite a nice relationship with Indy as he is almost like an adopted son to him, and the scene where they play cards together is funny, and we see that they are both cheating. The scene where Indy, under the influence of Kali, roughy slaps Shorty, who then uses a torch to purge Indy of the evil influence, and they make up after, is nicely played, with Indy hugging him saying "I'm sorry, kid". Willie however is the classic example of a diva and a damsel in distress who hardly stops screaming throughout the film, and her character can get quite annoying, but she does also provide some nice moments of humour, especially when she's at the banquet, clearly nauseated by the culinary collection of animal delicacies, and she says to Shorty "give me your hat, cos I wanna puke in it!" and her reaction to the chilled monkey brains, as she simply faints and falls off her chair.
Which brings me to the cast, who are all mostly pretty good, the three leads all actually work really well together. Harrison Ford is a good as ever in his role as Indy, who plays him with the perfect mix of low key charisma, humour and seriousness, and he get's plenty of good lines, like in the first film, one of my favs is an exterior shot of Pankot palace where we hear Indy inside one of the rooms shout "Shorty, where's my razor????". And possibly Harrison Ford's funniest moment in the film comes when he is trapped in the spikey room, where he looks through the hole in the wall to Willie and says "Willie, we are going to die!!" with a priceless expression on his face. Harrison Ford actually worked with a fitness trainer on the film to build up his body for the later scenes where he wears his torn shirt, although during the filming of the scene where the assassin tries to kill him, he herniated his back, which lead to him having to leave the production for a while, as he underwent surgery. But all that aside Harrison confidently carries on his role as intrepid archaeologist with aplomb (or a plum).
Ke Quan as Short round while he does well enough, he is a little annoying, especially with his hoky dialogue, but as I already said above, he does have a nice friendship with Indy throughout, and you get the sense that Ke Quan really enjoyed working with Harrison Ford. Kate Capshaw is actually really entertaining as Willie Scott, as she plays her as a pure diva at first, but as the film progresses she does calm down a bit more and begins to accept her situation, and comes to help both Indy and Shorty when they most need her. Her scene when they are in the woods camping out and she is screaming as she faces bats, snakes and all sorts of nightlife is funny (if a bit overdone) and the bit where she talks to Indy and she is being continually buffeted by one of the horses, but soon after a snake creeps up on her back, and she grabs it thinking its the horse as she says "I said cut it out!" and she throws snake away! Her scene with Indy in the palace where their flirt with each other is funny also, as they argue, Indy says he won't come back to her room, and she says "you'll be back here in five minutes!". After the attempt on Indy's life by the assassin, he races back in a few minutes later with Willie saying "Ohhh, Indy! Be gentle with me, be gentle!". Kate of course later went on to marry Spielberg, and they have been together ever since and now have six children, how about that???!
Of the supporting cast, surprisingly not too much to rave about, except
Amrish Puri, who was a famous star in India at the time, who is
excellent as the implacably evil Mola Ram, and also there is a brief
cameo from Dan Aykroyd, who puts on one very silly sounding English
accent, and gets the hilarious line when he addresses to Willie, near the start of the film, where Indy, Willie and Shorty are about to board the plane, "My God, aren't you Willie Scott,
the famous American female vocalist???".
The film of course does have a few flaws naturally, and its that difficult second film, it was never going to be as good as the first one. The action in itself is also ridiculously proposterous, especially the scene Indy, Willie and Shorty dive out the plane using the inflatable life boat, and they are hopelessly spinning through the sky, yet they manage somehow to inflate the lifeboat, and land the right way up on the water! And in the next moment where the lifeboat falls over a cliff into the raging waters below, the lifeboat doesn't tip over and they fall to their deaths, the lifeboat again some miraculously stays up and keeps them inside! I also found it a bit daft at the start when Lao Che introduces Indy to Willie by saying "this is Indiana Jones, the world famous archaeologist", as I don't quite see him as being a famous figure within the world of the series. Surely Indy would be just trying to travel incognitio on his journies, and the idea that he is world famous makes his character sound like is James Bond or something! So for me it was just a rather fatuous piece of dialogue. Some of the characters are also pretty inconsequential, the main one probably being the Maharaja who is just put on there for show, but as he is just a young lad, he probably wouldn't have much to contribute, as he is used as a figurehead. Also rather amusingly in the scene where the androgynous Maharaja recovers from the influence of Kali with help from Shorty, the Maharaja tells him how to get out of the mines, and they share a smile, and its almost like they have a brief homoerotic moment together (and I'm sure its not just me that thinks that!).
The film despite its flaws, has plenty of fun moments, especially when Indy fights the big head guard in the mines, as Indy tries to hit him with a big hammer, the guard takes it from him and throws it casually away and it hits one of the guards on the head, who is knocked out cold! I also liked the scene near the end where Indy having severed the wooden bridge in half, he tries climbing up one of the halves, and Mola Ram's men fire a volley of arrows at him, but they all miss, and Indy exclaims with relief. They also do a nice nod to the first film where Indy is challenged by two guards armed with swords, and he goes for his gun, but he hasn't got it, so he has to fight them off, and he grabs one of the men, using his sword hand to fight the other swordsmen. Then of course there is the moment where they are in the mines, and Indy has to use his shoe to grind the mine cart to a half before it crashes into the end of the line, and his foot is smoking hot, steaming, he shouts for water, and he sees the water from the dam surge towards him!
Technically the film looks great, again akin to Raiders, costing nearly $30 million, the sets all look lavish, particularly the Pankot palace ones. There is also some great model work, for the mines, despite the obvious shot of the little dolls substituting for the actors in one scene! Spielberg knows how to keep things moving along in temple of doom, and as usual the pace is at breakneck speed, and he always knows how to keep the audience riveted. John Williams once again provides a nice score, with a great mix of drama, thrills and humour all roled into it.
So that's it for the Temple of Doom, which makes for an enjoyable, if at times rather daft entry in the Jones adventures. So Part 3 coming up soon....
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