Review
Review Date: 25-May-08
Spoiler Rating: High
Juju Judgment: Just OK
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
It must have been hard to get the fourth Indiana Jones movie off the ground. The drafts of several screenwriters failed to pass muster with producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg — men who know what they want and usually get it — while star Harrison Ford failed to get any younger and Hollywood fretted he was too old to reassume the role. There must have come a point when Lucas, Spielberg, and final screenwriter David Koepp knew they had to think up something acceptable and get it into theaters pronto. So they borrowed themes from previous movies in the series and elsewhere in the legendary filmmakers' work. Sometimes the safest road is the fastest. Sometimes it is also rather dull.
Yes, the problem with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not the profusion of lines on Ford's face but the lack of freshness in the story he is called upon to tell. I mean a lack of both originality and vibrancy; this flick outright drags in spots and generates only passing enjoyment in others.
It tries for freshness by including charismatic up-and-comer Shia LaBeouf as a major new character. The Nazi era has given way to the age of sock hops and the Red Scare, and LaBeouf appears on the scene, in a veritable Marlon Brando moment, as a high school dropout with a switchblade and greased hair. He delivers an SOS from another archaeologist who has disappeared in the Amazon along with his mother (shades of Indy's third quest) and participates in the adventure that follows. Affable but underdeveloped, he is the conduit through which Lucas and Spielberg explore their pet notions of fatherhood and family (and, rumor has it, their desire to keep the franchise going), notions which are clumsy and unwelcome in their sappiness. (I prefer the kid from the much maligned second flick.) There are new villains as well, led by a Soviet scientist-nutjob played by the glorious Cate Blanchett. She echoes the single-minded intensity of Alison Doody's character in the third movie but with unmitigated, hard-edged efficiency. Blanchett and LaBeouf share the best action scene, a swordfight from atop separate vehicles barreling through the jungle. If only there were more humor in these roles, the kind that sparked when Sean Connery or John Rhys-Davies was around, they might have saved the picture.
After car chases, flesh-eating fire ants, cranky aborigines, and uncomfortable reunions (Ray Winstone keeps cropping up as a shady sidekick and Karen Allen returns from Raiders of the Lost Ark) — not to mention an A-bomb explosion which has nothing to do with anything but fascinates through bizarreness — the trail leads to another Lucas/Spielberg standby: aliens. I do not mind their injection into Indiana Jones lore, and UFOs seem appropriate for the 1950s, but I have hit my tolerance threshold for embryonic-looking visitors from other worlds. Also, the skull in question looks like the studio ran out of money for props. As one of my favorite characters from another film speculated, couldn't non-Earthlings resemble sponges or pinball machines? I say, why do they have to be thin, humanoid dudes with big heads? It is boring, narrow, and pompous to think that our shape is universal, and … by the time such thoughts assailed me I was ready for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to come to an end. Indiana Jones was invented to provide escapism, and it is unfortunate that his latest chapter makes you ready, though not eager, to escape him.
Copyright © 2008 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.
