I watched Temple Of Doom with the kids over the weekend. I am pretty sure I had not watched it all the way through (or even at all, really) since seeing it in the theater when it first came out.
I remembered being pretty disappointed back then, and was hoping to maybe be pleasantly surprised.
I was not. The movie is pretty terrible.
The tone is wildly inconsistent, the performances are weird and annoying, the story and plot make no sense, and the racial stereotypes are pretty awful even by the standards of 1980s pop culture.
The whole thing feels slapdash and shoddy. I know there have been accounts of everyone involved in making the film being in a bad place in their lives at the time. Supposedly we are supposed to believe that accounts for it’s “darker tone,” but it mostly just feels careless and by-the-numbers.