So one of the weird things about my childhood is that I never saw a lot of the “famous” movies of the era. I didn’t really sit down and watch Star Wars until I was a teen, I’ve still never seen Goonies or the Dark Crystal or Willow, and I never watched the Indianas Jones.

People of my age who did watch them as kids basically all agree that the first one is excellent and the second one is terrible, but having seen both of them for the first time as adults now, I don’t really see it? They feel extremely similar, like a medium-budget film version of 1930s pulp adventures.

The biggest difference, really, is that this one takes place in China and India. Famously, it’s basically taking the viewer on a Racist Stereotype Tour, but I don’t think that’s what would make it worse than the first one, because that’s also what the first one did in the Middle East. (And with Germans, but it’s hard to get too upset about negative Nazi stereotyping.) They’re both very faithfully taking these old-timey conceptions of things and putting them on-screen, in a way that nobody would do today, and the criticisms of the one pretty much apply to both.

My suspicion is that most people who hate this movie do so because of Short Round — there is absolutely nothing that kids hate more than a movie about adults that has an annoying, slightly younger, kid in it. I don’t know why that is — maybe because the kids are trying to identify with the heroes, and then throwing another kid in pulls them out of that identification? — but it’s definitely true in general, and my guess is that it was true here.

At any rate, for my part, this felt like basically just the second movie in the Indiana Jones series, and will appeal to the viewer precisely to the degree they want to watch an old-timey pulp adventure, warts and all.