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Top Critics (7)
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DVD (36)
Again you will savor the Indiana Jones schizophrenia: by day a bow-tied, bespectacled archaeologist; by night a resourceful swaggerer, whom Ford brings to life as a modern blend of Bogie and the Duke, with just a glint of misfit psychopathy in his eyes.
It's not the darker turn that makes The Temple of Doom uncomfortable at times; it's its mean-spiritedness.
Pic comes on like a sledgehammer, and there's even a taste of vulgarity and senseless excess not apparent in Raiders.
The film betrays no human impulse higher than that of a ten-year-old boy trying to gross out his baby sister by dangling a dead worm in her face.
Set years before the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is sillier, darkly violent and a bit dumbed down, but still great fun.
The kind of movie where your date is always grabbing your forearm in a viselike grip, as unbearable excitement unfolds on the screen. After the movie is over, you've had a great time but your arm is black-and-blue for a week.
More gore than the other Indy blockbusters.
...an obvious step down from its stellar predecessor...
[T]he best of the Indiana Jones movies...it's insanely wonderful, in every sense of those words.
It lacks the sense of detail that made Raiders such a treat. It isn't very clever, very funny or very compelling.
Just like the Thuggees took the magic rocks from a humble Indian village, the producers of this Temple of Doom DVD reissue made off with all the good extras.
The reality is that this is the film that comes closest to reflecting the racism, sexism and jingoism that fuelled most of the serials that originally sparked Spielberg and George Lucas's impressionable young imaginations.
Where the brilliant "Raiders" was an adventure film aimed at the child at heart, "Temple of Doom" is really designed for the kiddie market itself.
If it was a sign of the times for Indiana Jones to take on more of a comic-book aspect, the film's accomodation of darker themes and explicit imagery came as something of a shock to many.
...makes you wonder if Spielberg and series producer George Lucas might have been going through some sort of drug phase.
...they generated most of the excitement this time from a sequence of gross-out gags and several exhilarating stunts. (2008 reissued edition)
While The Temple of Doom is a bit gloomy, puts children in danger, and confines its action primarily to one spot, it's still quite entertaining.
A breakneck adventure that moves at twice the pace of the original but has only half the creative strength.
Fantastically choreographed action sequences and another comely companion for Indy (Capshaw) and gloriously overdone visual devices make up for the shameless lack of plot.
Though not as thrilling as Raiders of the Lost Ark, the second chapter still has merits, particularly its fast pacing, spectacular opening scene, and visual effects, which won the Oscars in 1984.
See website for more details.
darker indiana, still grand
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