Indiana Jones & The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull

Gee whizz! How does one review this movie? Perhaps it would be easier to transport oneself back to childhood to remember the excitement that an Indy film would arouse. If that seems difficult, ask George Lucas how he has manged it. He appears to have remained a child trapped inside the body of an aging Alf the alien lookalike. It seems anything he touches these days is tinged with the feverish and unfocused excitement of a kid with a big train set.

Until we talk to George, you'll have to put up with an adult review for the moment. Crystal Skull has a set-up that, like it or hate it, comes right out of the Spielberg and Lucas playbook. Indy becomes embroiled in the a quest for a Crystal Skull that the Russians (the new baddies) are seeking as it may have powers that are not of this earth i.e. extra-terrestrial. So it's heroes, action and aliens and a bit of sci-fi. The key to this quest is finding an loopy professor and the mother of Shia LeBeouf's cheap imitation of a young Brando. Yes, we are now in an era that Lucas and Spielberg can personally remember, the 1950's. Thus the reds are under the bed, the UFO's are in the sky, everybody looks like an extra from Grease and soft focus apple-pie Americana is everywhere.

Lucas and Spielberg lay all this on thick but somehow the 1st act still works quite well. It zips along at a nice pace and with good humour, charm and top-notch action set-pieces that never let Indy veer into CGI superhero territory. We feel his human limitations and believe the peril we're seeing even if the Russians obviously went to baddie shooting school. Then the quest and the goal arrive and he sets off upon Act 2 and things start to creak until they fall apart.

A horribly expedited plot leads to a quest we don't quite understand involving characters we don't really care about for reasons we're unsure of and we begin to wonder why everybody doesn't just pack it up and go home. That said, putting on rose tinted kid glasses, wasn't this the case with the previous 3 and they worked quite well. The plot is of course irrelevant so as long as all the other ingredients work then what's the problem?

Well ingredient 1 is the breakneck, popcorn friendly old-school action sequences that had us all having epi-fits as kids. Well the bad news is these just don't work. Though impressively choreographed and executed as one would expect of Spielberg, they betray the spirit on an Indy movie in that a) Indy and many of the other principles feel superhuman and immune to injury of any sort. b) Simplicity is jettisoned for an orgy of over-the top action with CGI that feels like it's straight out of The Mummy. There are (almost) no booby traps, closing walls, bridge's over corcodile pits and trap doors from which to rescue his hat. Instead we have characters impossibly swinging from tree to tree on vines as if they are Spiderman, surviving waterfall drops as if they were immortal and straddling 2 jeeps simultaneously as if they were...well, as if they were on a green screen stage in front of a wind machine quite frankly. In other words, simple effective visual drama is exchanged for meaningless, supposedly awesome spectacle. The curse of the CGI era. Shock and awe over story.

Ingredient 2 is Indy's dry wit. Apart from the first act it's mostly missing. Harrison Ford just doesn't have the timing any more and his one-liners are hopelessly cheesy. When he winds up for one, we see Harrison not Indy and we cringe appropriately. To be fair, he's not the only one to let the side down. It's perhaps harsh to say but there might be a reason that Karen Allen hasn't had much work since Raiders. 2 words. Ham Sandwich.

Ingredient 3 is Indy's repeated character arc of reluctant sceptical hero who ends up doing things for the right reasons and truly believes in the mystical power at the end. This is hiding among the mess somewhere, but it's unfocused and unclear and ultimately unsatisfying.

Ingredient 4 is our respect and love of Indy for just being so damn kick-ass and all-knowing. Here he makes so many mistakes that the audience are just screaming at him to cop on! Keep an eye out for his relationship with Ray Winstone's shamefully underwritten character as an example.

To be fair, this isn't a disaster. The set-up is good and it offers us a chance to view Indy in a new era and in an altered cultural landscape, which justifies his return. Dispite the criticisms above, this is still an Indy movie and there are enough traces of the original ingredients of the recipe to make this taste like the real thing. It's fun, it's unpretentious, it's technically well-crafted, and it seems to have been done in the right spirit. Whereas John McClane's return pissed all over the legacy of a rounded trilogy and offered no artistic reason for the comeback, this just about manages to fall closer to Rocky than Rambo in this emerging aging hero sub-genre.

Lucas and Spielberg neither deserve a pat on the back nor a bat to the head. I can't help wonder how Lucas would defend our criticisms if he had the chance. Based on this slice of Americana apple-pie, one suspects he might stay stuff like gee whizz!

2/5