Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (**3/4)

Maybe Hollywood was worried there weren’t enough recent movies to make sequels to, old ones to remake, or 1970s TV shows to turn into big-screen extravaganzas, and there was a fear that new ideas would be needed. Finding a new way to plunder the past, they’ve begun churning out sequels with action heroes—Rocky, Rambo, Die Hard’s John McClain—who’d apparently retired in the 1990s. So here’s Harrison Ford, 65 years old, reuniting with director Steven Spielberg in the fourth installment of the Indy series, one that, instead of being set in the 1930s, brings the adventurer-professor into the age of Elvis and the Red Menace. The primary villain is a Soviet agent played by the ever-versatile Cate Blanchett. As the film begins, KGB agents have captured Indy, along with his friend Mac (Ray Winstone), in the Nevada desert and forced him to help find a dead alien in a crate. Will the creaky Indy escape from a passel of KGB agents? Of course.

Actually, 65 or not, Ford looks fine, and a few more gray hairs kind of suits a character who was kind of curmudgeonly to begin with. He plays surprisingly well off a newly acquired, slick-haired sidekick (Shia LaBeouf) whose mother has a past with Indy and whose motorcycle barely survives a chase through the Yale University campus. Then, the cast head off to Peru, where Indy reunites under unpleasant circumstances with an old colleague (John Hurt) and an old girlfriend (Karen Allen). The return of the spunky Allen (she was in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but not the first two sequels) is welcome, but mildly underwritten.

Whereas the first half of the movie has a nice balance of humor, action, and plot development, the last half seems to devolve into a very long chase scene, with an anticlimactic ending that relies too much on CGI effects. Maybe I’m just less enthralled by crystal skulls than George Lucas, who came up with the idea for the movie, but I felt like Dr. Jones’s quickly rattled-off explanations of all the clues were just excuses to get to the next action sequence. And while Ford has aged well, time (and Indy’s many imitators) has made the series seem less novel. This one made me think especially of the National Treasure movies, particularly the lesser second one, which similarly piled on the unreality. Here, Indy survives killer ants, waterfall plunges, and, oh yeah, a nuclear bomb while revealing the ability to translate ancient Mayan on the fly. The KGB agents, meanwhile, repeatedly turn into the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Individually, none of these elements was that objectionable, but in totality they seemed over the top, even for a series that’s supposed to be that way. So I didn’t love the film, but Spielberg does know how to make an action scene exciting, so the result is a mixed bag.

IMDB link

viewed 5/24/08; reviewed 5/29/08 and 6/1/08