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Extra-Spoilery Review - Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Let’s give voice to the simmering snideness that’s been steaming under the surface for awhile now. Let the dam break and the vaguely bile-flavored observations rush to the fore:

The movie starts as if Indiana Jones tripped and face-planted into American Graffiti. And then it starts again. And then again. And then the movie ceases beginning, and begins to move ceaselessly. Well, up until it turns into a game of Donkey Kong Jr. But before John Hurt becomes Prof. Bruttenholm from Hellboy and Indy steps out to witness version 2.0 of U2’s Vertigo video, something pretty interesting happens. An honest to God Indiana Jones movie begins to pop, slowly, like a bag of Orville Redenbacher in an underpowered microwave.

Let’s step back and marvel at the set-pieces that work: (Aaron's Note - NO JOKE. THIS IS AN EXTRA SPOILERY REVIEW. NO COMPLAINING IF YOU CLICK "MORE")

The Ant-Fight. The Boat/Tank chase. The leisurely drive through the university. Let’s shake our head ruefully at the set-pieces that work in spite of themselves: The 3 steps made out of waterfall. The tree-top peel out.

The jump of the flying saucer.

Let’s just step back, period. For a second or two. Let’s look at Henry "Indiana" Jones, Jr. Harrison Ford remembers this guy pretty well. I was afraid he’d forgotten, and there are times in this movie where his grasp on the character
seems—maybe not shaky, but not as tight, not as forceful as it once was. But this is definitely Indiana Jones, and it’s felt most in his non-action scenes. Like when he sees Marion Ravenwood for the first time in a long time, and when he’s setting-up the whole movie while in a T-shirt, post de-lousing, in a Federal sweatbox, across the table from a pasty Miguel Ferrer lookalike and the Janitor from Scrubs.

You hear it in the confused/scared barks he’ll let out that typically kick off the long, involved set-pieces, or the casual but not-quite-condescending explanations of exposition you need to get to that next set-piece. The man looks, sounds, and moves like he should.

And yet, there’s still a tiredness to him that, even if it’s intentionally put in there by all involved (Koepp, Lucas, Spielberg and Ford,) that doesn’t help endear him to the audience this time out in the way Shia LeBeouf does. The kid is the living embodiment of Hollywood Overexposure lately, in a way that Jake Gyllenhaal only dreamed of a few years ago. And yet, after maybe 3 minutes on screen, he shows why he’s so overexposed: The kid is damned good. And likable. To the point where his role, and his performance of that role, is more enjoyable than Ford’s beleagured Indy. Everyone knows that at some point, he’s going to be asked to pick up the hat. I’m not so sure everyone wants him to put that hat on. But his performance in this movie is such that when his hands hit the brim of that battered brown leather, it feels correct.

But this isn’t a great movie. It’s a good one. It’s thin, lightweight and more than a little boring in a couple spots. Its secondary characters are more tertiary characters, and hoping for anything beyond that from anyone not named Allen or Blanchett is a waste of time. Not even Ray Winstone can really rise above the flatline of a character he’s been handed. The most interesting side-character moment comes when, for the first time I can think of, you get to see what the Wilhelm scream looks like as it’s being delivered. That’s about as deep as the secondary characters go. No Lao Che. No Chattar Lal. No seig-heiling monkeys.

There are regular ol’ monkeys, though. Lots of em. They help Shia defeat a carload of commies. There’s a running gag involving groundhogs as Greek chorus in the beginning of the movie, a gag that concludes one of the more ridiculous (in a bad way) action sequences ever seen in a Spielberg flick. They’re quickly forgotten by the visceral oogy-ness of “Big Damn Ants” basically melting people like six-legged lava, but all I wondered while watching some of these sequences, was whether Spielberg or Lucas had been the one binging on Animal Planet marathons recently. Watching Shia LeBeouf swing from vine to vine like Greystoke: Fonzarelli of the Mist as hundreds of monkeys keep pace, cutting through Kaminski’s Douglas Slocombe impersonation, didn’t lift spirits, didn’t cause the celluloid to soar. It just looked doofy. It looked like a mixed drink made of movies: 2 parts Last Crusade, 1 part Mummy Returns.

Blanchett is a little more menacing than Julian Glover and Alison Doody, and her muscle vaguely reminds of Pat Roach. They do their jobs well, even if they don’t quite stick the landing. It’s good to see Karen Allen again, and her pixie-ish,
mile-wide grin is still engaging as hell, but she doesn’t feel like Marion Ravenwood at all. Yes, time has passed, yes, she and Indy still bicker, but there’s no bite there. Marion is utterly defanged as a character, her caustic nature traded for cuteness. Broadbent and Hurt have their one note to play and they play it professionally and with class, but they both feel pretty wasted. Were
Hurt not physically holding the Crystal Skull of the title, I think I’d have forgotten he was there, period.

I think the movie hinted strongly it was going to follow not in the footsteps of Raiders, but Crusade, when a carload of Russkies crash into a statue of Marcus Brody, accidentally knocking Brody’s iron head off, sending it through the windshield to rest, wry grin face-up in the lap of a Russian agent. Crusade was willing to sacrifice Brody’s character and Denholm Elliot’s quiet integrity in the first movie for a series of goofy expressions and insipid one-liners. This movie puts his disembodied head in the lap of an empty villain for a throwaway gag.

Not to say the film isn’t fun. It’s slight, it’s mostly weightless, but there are
things that should be seen on a large screen with loud speakers and eyes open as wide as you can get them to drink in the hyper-kineticism Spielberg brings to this fluff. It’s the least of the Indiana Jones movies, and maybe not even as good as the best Mummy movie, but it’s still a great time at the theaters, and a good reminder that Spielberg may have grown exponentially as a film-maker, but when he wants to get your blood pumping at the sheer audacity of an action set-piece, he’s damn well going to do it. In one instance, he takes the concept of the lava battle from Revenge of the Sith--the segment that Spielberg cut his teeth on digital pre-viz with,--swaps out robots for cars, lava for a jungle, and Vader/Obi-Wan with Shia/Cate. And effortlessly tops it, not just in motion and tension but with the sword fight choreography. And manages to toss in crotch-shot jokes without wrecking any of the suspense.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is fun fluff that manages to rely on nostalgia to move it forward, without getting caught in the Star Wars prequels trap of rose-colored cinematic masturbation. It spins its wheels a couple times but never gets stuck. It’s a decent action flick made good by the history and goodwill Ford and Spielberg have earned with the character, and the surprising ease at which Shia LeBeouf fits into that canon.

Thanks Fatboy, be sure to check him out every Monday - Friday, 7pm to Midnight on 101 KUFO with his Captain, that Molting Wookie, Cort on Cort and Fatboy- AD