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D.W. Griffith could have written this: always begin your movies with a bang. Or, as in Temple of Doom, a Chinese gong. This one is rung to signal the beginning of tonight's floor show at the Obi Wan Club in Shanghai, 1935. Presenting Miss Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) and her pan-Asian chorus line in a delicious rendition of Cole Porter's Anything Goes—in Mandarin Chinese! At a nearby table, Professor Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is haggling for his life with a trio of Chinese gangsters: the diamond in his possession in return for a vial containing the antidote to a poison he has just swallowed. Gong! another production number commences, with Indy and Willie scrambling on the floor to find the antidote and the diamond among flying ice cubes, bullets, balloons and feet as the chorus giddily scatters through the chaos. Wow!
There is plenty more in store for Indy, Willie and Indy's pre-teen sidekick Short Round (Ke Huy Quan) before the end of reel one. A hairbreadth escape through the bustling back streets of Shanghai! A scarifying ride in a pilotless plane! A midair bailout in a raft that bounces them onto a steep mountain slope for a wild toboggan ride off a cliff and into a raging river whose rapids carry them to ... But you get the idea. An army of professionals—439 listed in the credits—has set the narrative motor purring in high gear.
The main plot, about the search for a sacred stone stolen by a coven of Indian thugs and used to augment sadistic black-magic rituals in the bowels of the temple of doom, need not concern us here. Suffice it to say that the new film is more an embellishment than an improvement on the snazzy Raiders. If you enjoyed seeing skeletons rise on spikes, or Indy snap his trusty bullwhip around a steel-willed woman, or the two of them trapped in a cave with uggy crawling things, you should be amused to see them again. 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.
Again you will slip easily into the care of some expert masseurs, now stroking, now pummeling, as Temple of Doom heads for a climax that is a literal cliffhanger.
Snaking through the movie is a familiar Spielberg theme: the disappearance, and then the welcome return, of children. It illuminates his three most personal movies (Close Encounters, Poltergeist and E.T.) and affirms his belief in movies as a Mechanized Fountain of Youth. Toward the end of Temple of Doom, Indiana leads hundreds of enslaved Indian children out of an underground quarry and into the light. Spielberg means to be another kind of Pied Piper: leading grownups into the darkness of a moviehouse to restore, for a couple of hours at least, the innocence of childhood in all its wonder and terror. The wonder may reach as deep as E. T; the terror may be as slick and exhilarating as Temple of Doom's climactic underground tram ride. If Lucas and Spielberg ever do open a Star World, this combo of Disney World's Space Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain Railway rides should be the hottest attraction.