10 Famous Movies That Got Away With Half-Assed Plots

10. Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom Clings To An Outline Of A Story Featuring "Magic Rocks"

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom serves as a prequel to the brilliant Raiders of the Lost Ark, and features sardonic hero Dr. Henry "Indiana" Jones, archaeologist and adventurer, who - having crashed landed in India - winds up trying to find a mystical stone for a local village. Already, we're moving in and amongst "Um..." territory with a plot about a mystical stone, but hey, whatever, right? Unfortunately for this movie, though, the plot never amounts to anything more than "there are magic stones, and they can be used to take over the world, so find them, please." Seriously: the bad guy in this movie, Thuggee cult leader Mola Ram, has a plan to take over the world using a bunch of stones. We don't ever learn how that would even be possible - or why Mola Ram thinks it's possible. He just mentions that through assembling all of the Sankara stones, a bunch of which are buried in some ancient catacombs where he has slave children digging for them, all of the Gods will fall and he'll take over the world. The movie gets away with this because it never slows down to allow you to ponder what the heck Mola Ram plans to do with some rocks whose only power seems to be "to get quite hot." Sure, you can say that the plot is purposely vague because this is a homage to those movie serials of the '30s, but Raiders made such an effort to craft a believable, detailed narrative that this just feels like something George Lucas scrawled on the back of napkin by comparison.