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Why Temple Of Doom Is The Best Indiana Jones Film

Eight minutes into Temple Of Doom, Indiana Jones kills someone by hurling a flaming kebab into his chest. As far as I’m aware, we hadn’t seen such a thing on screen before. Or in real life. It’s outrageous really, an insane thing to do, and to see. But all of Temple Of Doom is loopy. With Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas had made a genuinely classic film, got heaps of acclaim, and now here they were with a follow-up for which they, well, went mad. To which I say: Thank you.

Temple Of Doom is pulpier, funnier, sillier, scarier than Raiders. Each Indy outing is tonally different from the last; this one actually becomes a whole other film halfway through, switching unapologetically from knockabout farce to traumatic nightmare. And for all its faults – which, for all the film’s greatness, are admittedly plentiful – it is, pound for pound, the most consistently entertaining of the series, existing purely to thrill you, frighten you, delight you, no more, no less. Anything goes. Let the gong-shield roll.

Some context. Lucas cooked this up in 1982 whilst in the midst of a porce and, as he has said, “wasn’t in a good mood.” Darkness beckoned. Having come up with the bones of the story – black magic, voodoo, child slavery, hearts being ripped out of chests – he hunkered down with Spielberg and writers Williard Huyck and Gloria Katz to see it through. They emerged with a jolly working title: ‘Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Death’. Spielberg was in tune with Lucas’ edgier ambitions, but wanted to balance it out with comedy, hence an opening hour which goes from the ridiculous to the sublimely ridiculous.

Having kicked off with a Busby Berkeley-inspired bit of song and dance just because, the film sticks Indy, Short Round and Willie in a plane with no fuel, no pilots, and no parachutes, and so they jump out, clinging to a dinghy which plummets down onto a mountain, off a cliff and into the rocky rapids. There are no broken bones. No bruises. Not a scratch. There was certainly nothing that outlandish in Raiders, in part because the sequence was written for Raiders but abandoned. Raiders restrained itself; there’d be no such restraint here. The dinghy incident is about as incredulous as it gets, letting you know – if it wasn’t clear enough already – that this film is not in the business of subtlety.

Temple Of Doom, as it would be renamed, just wants to give you a good time at the old picture house, and its exuberance is summed up by one small human: the 12-year-old Ke Huy Quan, whose Short Round is absolute joy on legs, lightning in a bottle, an immediate pick-me-up, just about as much fun as a person can be. It’s a crying shame that Ke left the profession behind soon after, due to the dearth of decent roles for Asian actors. We lost decades of that guy, prior to his Everything Everywhere All At Once comeback. Watch Temple Of Doom again, and his recent red-carpet reunions with Ford seem all the more poignant. What a winning combo they were. You can’t fake – or engineer – chemistry like that. It’s top-tier sidekicking.

Ford also had chemistry with Kate Capshaw, whose Willie Scott has been frowned upon ever since, rightly so. A damsel in distress who spends almost all of her time shrieking, screaming or squealing, whining over a broken nail, she was an oddly regressive creation for the sequel. Marion Ravenwood she is not. But Capshaw gives it her all, defying the restrictions of her character by pouring on fizzy charm.

You can picture Spielberg and Lucas on set, grinning at all the madness. Cinema!

Willie is not Temple’s only misstep. Released in 1984, a few months before Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ – which ludicrously claimed that nothing ever grows in Africa, where “no rain nor rivers flow” – Temple Of Doom’s portrayal of an India populated by desperate, starving villagers is of a similar ilk. By the time it gets to its triumphant ending, with Indy surrounded by the hundreds of children he’s rescued for the grateful villagers, its white saviour complex knows no bounds.

And so, one must discuss the menu at Pankot Palace. Lucas had always wanted to put such an Abbott and Costello-esque sequence in a film, a wildly off-putting banquet which seems a little less wild in this golden age of famous people eating kangaroo anuses on TV for I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, but was a hoot at the time, with its dead snake filled with eels, its eyeball soup, its chilled monkey brains. It’s still entertaining now, for its wide-eyed slapstick tomfoolery, but there’s no denying it perpetuated quite the stereotype. Although according to Roshan Seth, who played the Indian Prime Minister Chattar Lal, it was one big misunderstanding.

“I got a great deal of flak for it,” he told Empire in 2006, “because people kept saying, ‘How does an intelligent man like you agree to be in a film which shows Indians dining on beetles and eels?’ Steven intended it as a joke, the joke being that Indians were so fucking smart that they knew all Westerners think that Indians eat cockroaches, so they served them what they expected. The joke was too subtle for that film.” Yes, as we have already established, there was no room for subtlety in this film. And things would get even less subtle after this – to great and grisly effect.

It's probably at the point when the young man gets his beating heart pulled out of his chest before being lowered face first into a fire pit and burned alive – actually burned alive, right in front of us – that you realise Temple Of Doom is not here to make friends. Spielberg is going for it. Cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, bathing it all in red, gives us Hell. John Williams instructs his choir to be terrifying. There is agonising voodoo, our hero writhing in pain. Indy, having been whipped to shreds, drinks black blood from a skull and turns evil, before striking Short Round. There is upsetting chanting. People are screaming. You can picture Lucas and Spielberg on set, grinning at all the madness. Cinema!

As Indy snaps out of it, beginning to fight back as the fanfare kicks in, the film lurches once more, now heading into a final, gleeful half hour of heroics, of unapologetic thrills and spills. With cameras attached in and on the mine-carts, Spielberg gives us a rollercoaster chase / knife-fight / shoot-out for the ages, flinging us into a deathly fun-house joy-ride. And that’s before gifting us the rope-bridge showdown, a set-piece of such vertiginous ingenuity you can’t help but smile at the sheer bravado of it all. Among it all is Harrison Ford, the most handsome man alive, in his prime, sword aloft, eyes shining, a living icon. Even his sweat smoulders. Below him, hungry alligators eat bad guys alive, ripping them to shreds. You can’t argue with that.

Some reviewers lost their shit when Temple Of Doom was released. The Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker called the darkest section ‘unrelenting sadism’. People magazine’s Ralph Novak said that taking kids to see it ‘would be a cinematic form of child abuse’, informing readers that the real villains of the piece are Spielberg and Lucas. The director soon turned on it himself, in 1989 stating that he wasn’t happy with the film “at all”, that it was “much too horrific”. Incorrect. It’s the extremity that makes it work, that makes it so stupidly exciting. And ironically, for a film that contains the most morbid material from the series, it’s the most kid-friendly, precisely because of its darkness, let alone all the laughs. Of course kids loved it.

Not all critics took aim. In The New Yorker, Pauline Kael exalted it, writing that the film being less ‘sincere’ than Raiders was ‘what is so good about it’. No doubt, there’s something of a guilty pleasure about Temple Of Doom, on more than a couple of levels. You have to forgive quite a bit. And you need to suspend every ounce of disbelief there is. But why wouldn’t you want to, when it’s this much fun?

READ MORE: Why Raiders Of The Lost Ark Is The Best Indiana Jones Film