Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom Review

I'm not a huge Harrison Ford fan.  He always seems angry and his line delivery is usually wooden and awkward.  When you add in the camp factor of the Indiana Jones movies, I should absolutely hate them.  But, for some reason, I like them.  I think it has to do with the combination of Steven Spielberg's directing and John Williams' music.  Overall, the film is really well made.  The story is intriguing and very dark and Spielberg keeps it moving at a very good pace.  The tension builds quite well to a great climax in the mine.  This is helped along by the fact that the effects are very good for 1984 and, while they haven't aged as well as some, they never seem too bad.

The flaws in this movie are with the characters.  I don't care for situations where a child is put in a heroic role.  That's what they did with Short Round.  They also tried to make him the source for all of the comic relief and did it in a very racially insensitive stereotypical way.  He was only slightly less annoying than Jar Jar Binks.  But, that's George Lucas' MO.  The second character flaw is the Willie Scott character.  Kate Capshaw just could not pull this off.  It may be her talent level or it may be that the character is just so shallow that there's no way any decent writing could give it depth.  And her lines were very poorly written.  The only saving grace of having Capshaw in the movie was the cleavage factor.

But, the action and film making outweigh the two crappy characters.  I'm willing to put up with those two for the action and tense situations.  See it.