“Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” is rated a soft PG. It also scared the snot out of my nine- and seven-year-old daughters. Which is not to say they didn’t like it.
“It was fun, funny, and scary.” That was the seven-year-old’s straightforward review.
Here’s what she was talking about. And in case you haven’t seen this 40-year-old movie, there are SPOILERS.
The fun and funny parts
This movie is bookended by two incredible adventure set pieces. The first involves jumping out of an airplane in an inflatable raft. And the climactic chase takes place in runaway mine cars. That’s what you come to a movie like this for. And the kids were enthralled by it.
The laughs belong almost entirely to Ke Huy Quan, who was 12 when this was shot. Now 51, he’s in the middle of a career renaissance. He’s taking an unlikely victory lap for his work in “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” And during his Golden Globes acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actor, he said it all started with Steven Spielberg picking him for this movie.
He also told the NYTimes recently that after this role and his turn as Data in “Goonies,” the phone stopped ringing. And “when there was [a role, it] was very stereotypical, and you had every Asian in Hollywood fighting for it.”
So I was a little worried that this character was going to be cringier than I remembered him. But despite speaking in broken English throughout the movie, he never feels like a comedic punching bag, never demeaned beyond his unfortunate moniker Short Round. (Why couldn’t he have been called something like Tiger? Or just Junior? Or his real name?) He’s actually a hero in the story, saving Indiana’s hide, punching well above his weight class, and beating Indiana Jones at poker—even if he is cheating.
The parts that haven’t aged well
The movie improbably opens with a big showtune that feels lifted out of an MGM musical. It’s well-choreographed and all. But it features a bunch of white ladies in glittery cheongsam, with fans, conical hats, and cropped black wigs. They’re led by the star, Kate Capshaw as Willie–who wears her hair long and blonde. She lip-syncs to a Mandarin recording of Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes.” And the arrangement is laced up with embarrassing pentatonic flourishes.
Might be a good opportunity to talk about cultural appropriation. And the opportunities keep coming as Indy, Willie, and Short Round make their way to India.
There’s a dinner scene that seems staged just to freak out the hysterical Willie with strange food. This peaks with a dessert of monkey brains, served inside monkey heads. (Here’s an article that claims this is a real delicacy in China. It also says the dish causes Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Hey, anything goes.) More troublesome than the exotic foodstuffs is the heavy use of brownface throughout the Temple of Doom. There’s also the casually insane Hindi cult called the Thuggees. They’re at the beating, ripped-out heart of the plot.
The scary parts of Indiana Jones
Okay, with those issues out of the way we can discuss the part of the movie that had some “close your eyes!” and fast-forward moments. These were all deep within the eponymous Temple of Doom. Once you see the cult strap a guy into a steel barbecue and start chanting, “Kali Ma!,” you know it’s decision time. Beyond that scene, you also get a voodoo doll, zombies, and, most disturbingly, child slavery, with kids being whipped and abused and forced to mine for magical rocks.
The kids all get freed, of course. And we watched the victorious final twenty minutes without interruption.
Have you watched any Indiana Jones pics with your kids? What’s the most intense adventure movie you’ve watched together?