Saturday, 12/13/08

All the howling about the shortcomings of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" made me doubt my recollection of Temple of Doom. So I re-watched the latter, under near-ideal big-home-theater circumstances, and I defy anyone to name a Spielberg movie that's any worse.

I'll stipulate that Crystal Skull features excessive George Lucas, a cavalier use of the Ark warehouse, a moderately annoying adolescent sidekick, parallel roads in a rain forest, a poor grasp of both atomic weapons and magnetism, and superfluous aliens. But it also has Karen Allen, Cate Blanchett, and Ray Winstone, who make up for a lot of ills. I saw Crystal Skull with my dad, 19 years after the two of us saw the previous installment, and we had a fine time.

Temple of Doom, after stumbling through an opening sequence that would have been cut from Big Trouble In Little China, comes right back with cavalier use of Dan Akroyd, a pre-adolescent karate-kicking orphan sidekick, parallel unsafe trolly tracks, no conception of which cultures subscribe to voodoo, and a lazy deus ex machina rescue, which would have insulted the audience even if it didn't consist of delivery from Indian brutes by the British Empire.

Did everyone somehow forget the dining sequence, with the creepy kid-Mararajah? Larry David couldn't conjure a worse audience embarrassment, and it only fails to stop the movie cold by making Indy too distracted to eat. Lucas' decision to weakly retread his own trash-compactor scene just six years after Star Wars would have been inexplicable even without putting Harrison Ford in it. And for the Thuggee zombie-juice to be instantly reversible by fire, in caverns where fire is the only light source, makes even less sense than the aliens in Signs besieging a planet that's 71% covered in water.

And then there's Kate Capshaw, whose role is so shrilly unappealing that as a ~12-year-old boy seeing this for the first time, I not only couldn't figure out what Indy liked about her, their continued relationship seemed like a black mark against heterosexuality. To go from Marion Ravenwood to Willie Scott is like breaking up with Formula One and having a fling with a Costco parking lot.

It's a tribute to the quality of Raiders that the franchise didn't die with this stinker. I'd sit through Hook, A.I., and Jurassic Park 2 all back-to-back before this again. 04:43PM «

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