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Movie Review 5/28
Here’s how long Indy has been gone: When the last “Indiana Jones” movie, “The Last Crusade,” came out in 1987, I was in fifth grade and saw it at a party for my friend John’s 11th birthday. I turn 30 later this summer.
After years of stops and starts resulting from script problems and busy schedules, Harrison Ford has finally re-donned Indy’s fedora, along with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”
The result is an at times exciting, but mostly middling effort that doesn’t quite live up to its predecessors, but is still far from the disappointment that Lucas’ “Star Wars” prequels were. Nor is it nearly as bad as Ron Howard’s “The Da Vinci Code” film, which sported a similar plot and also had a less-than-rapturous Cannes debut.
Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way first: Harrison Ford is 65 years old, which is a tad outside the general demographic for action stars. His age, though, isn’t really a distraction. It’s not like we haven’t seen Harrison Ford in 20 years — we know what he looks like these days, we’ve been seeing him in action films in most of that intervening time, and you pretty much stop noticing the gray hairs after about 10 minutes.
The movie’s plot is set in the late 1950s, and has Indy, the intrepid archeologist hero, fighting evil Soviet spies (led by a short-wigged Cate Blanchett) over an artifact of possibly alien origin. Though, as with every other post-1990 movie with communist villains, there are also McCarthyite bad guys.
The plot skips around the globe from Nevada to Europe to South America, as Dr. Jones is joined by “Raiders of the Lost Ark” heroine Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen, looking amazing), and her son, “Mutt” (Shia LaBeouf, undoubtedly included to give the franchise a post-Ford future). Also joining in the fun are “The Departed’s” Ray Winstone as the story’s Lando Calrissian and John Hurt in a role that requires him mostly to mumble and look scared.
I agree with the criticism by many early reviewers that it doesn’t seem like much is at stake — we never get the sense that the heroes are ever in any danger, or that evil has any chance of triumphing. Indy is only ever in jeopardy in the opening scene, and we can sort of guess that he’ll make it through that. When the heroes go over a waterfall, we sort of feel like they’ll be all right — because we saw the other three Indy films, and we also saw “The Fugitive.”
The pace is also a bit lethargic, and the film also suffers from the usual Spielberg Achilles’ heel of many, many false endings. But, Spielberg and Lucas do manage to blow us away with a couple of dynamite action sequences that rank with their best: a long, elaborate chase scene in Peru, and the final special effects sequence involving the skull itself. More scenes like that, and “Crystal Skull” could have joined the pantheon with its predecessors.
The trend in recent years, in this age of “franchise reboots,” has been for franchises to return after long absences. After “Star Wars” returned from a 16-year layoff in 1999, Rocky came back after 16 years, Rambo after 20, and “Die Hard” returned last year after a 12-year layoff.
While it certainly relies on lots of tributes to the earlier films, “Crystal Skull” isn’t exactly the pure nostalgia exercise that “Rocky Balboa” was; it stands on its own as an entertaining, albeit flawed, film.
After years of stops and starts resulting from script problems and busy schedules, Harrison Ford has finally re-donned Indy’s fedora, along with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”
The result is an at times exciting, but mostly middling effort that doesn’t quite live up to its predecessors, but is still far from the disappointment that Lucas’ “Star Wars” prequels were. Nor is it nearly as bad as Ron Howard’s “The Da Vinci Code” film, which sported a similar plot and also had a less-than-rapturous Cannes debut.
Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way first: Harrison Ford is 65 years old, which is a tad outside the general demographic for action stars. His age, though, isn’t really a distraction. It’s not like we haven’t seen Harrison Ford in 20 years — we know what he looks like these days, we’ve been seeing him in action films in most of that intervening time, and you pretty much stop noticing the gray hairs after about 10 minutes.
The movie’s plot is set in the late 1950s, and has Indy, the intrepid archeologist hero, fighting evil Soviet spies (led by a short-wigged Cate Blanchett) over an artifact of possibly alien origin. Though, as with every other post-1990 movie with communist villains, there are also McCarthyite bad guys.
The plot skips around the globe from Nevada to Europe to South America, as Dr. Jones is joined by “Raiders of the Lost Ark” heroine Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen, looking amazing), and her son, “Mutt” (Shia LaBeouf, undoubtedly included to give the franchise a post-Ford future). Also joining in the fun are “The Departed’s” Ray Winstone as the story’s Lando Calrissian and John Hurt in a role that requires him mostly to mumble and look scared.
I agree with the criticism by many early reviewers that it doesn’t seem like much is at stake — we never get the sense that the heroes are ever in any danger, or that evil has any chance of triumphing. Indy is only ever in jeopardy in the opening scene, and we can sort of guess that he’ll make it through that. When the heroes go over a waterfall, we sort of feel like they’ll be all right — because we saw the other three Indy films, and we also saw “The Fugitive.”
The pace is also a bit lethargic, and the film also suffers from the usual Spielberg Achilles’ heel of many, many false endings. But, Spielberg and Lucas do manage to blow us away with a couple of dynamite action sequences that rank with their best: a long, elaborate chase scene in Peru, and the final special effects sequence involving the skull itself. More scenes like that, and “Crystal Skull” could have joined the pantheon with its predecessors.
The trend in recent years, in this age of “franchise reboots,” has been for franchises to return after long absences. After “Star Wars” returned from a 16-year layoff in 1999, Rocky came back after 16 years, Rambo after 20, and “Die Hard” returned last year after a 12-year layoff.
While it certainly relies on lots of tributes to the earlier films, “Crystal Skull” isn’t exactly the pure nostalgia exercise that “Rocky Balboa” was; it stands on its own as an entertaining, albeit flawed, film.
