Indy rocks

>> Indiana Jones and the Kingdom
of the Crystal Skull is better
than we had all feared

OLD-FASHIONED ACTION:
Shia LaBeouf, Harrison Ford and Karen Allen

by MARK SLUTSKY

You have every justification for going into Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with lowered expectations. For many, the Indiana Jones movies, along with the original Star Wars saga, stand as the apotheosis of Hollywood blockbuster moviemaking: smart, funny and incomparably thrilling mass entertainment. We all remember the fiasco when George Lucas last revived one of his signal franchises. The brazenly awful Star Wars prequels weren’t just letdowns; they were incompetent on every level save the most technical.

No one wants to see that type of garish mistreatment ruin Indy too. So the good news is, the fourth entry in the Indy series, coming almost 20 years after the underrated Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, is no Phantom Menace. It’s not the best entry in the series, by far, and it’s got some serious problems. But it still has Steven Spielberg at the helm, and for the most part the guy still knows how to direct the heck out of this kind of stuff.

The story is set some 20 years after the last Indy adventure, in 1957 (the series’ po-faced campiness and serial adventure roots actually map pretty well onto that era, or maybe it’s just Spielberg’s particular all-American sensibility). With the Nazis vanquished, it’s the Communists who are battling with an older Harrison Ford for mystical whatnots.

Though the exact plot is too convoluted to relate here, it involves a South American artifact said to grant mind-controlling power to whoever returns it to its rightful spot in a lost city of antiquity.

To that end, Ukrainian baddie Irina Spalko (a sexy and severe Cate Blanchett) enlists Ford’s reluctant help. Throw into the mix a motorcycle-riding, greaser son he never knew he had (Shia LaBeouf) and the return of the sassy Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen, back onscreen after a long, long absence) and plenty of action set pieces, and you have the latest adventure, one that is significantly less focused on the older Ford and more on the whole family.

Spielberg hasn’t lost his touch for hokey but thrilling set pieces, and to the movie’s credit, it rarely slows down, with memorable sequences in malt shops, libraries, ancient caves, jungles and government warehouses.

At times, the action is interfered with by a little too much usage of CGI, especially the meh climax, but it’s nowhere near as obscenely computer-generated as the Star Wars prequels. For the most part, Spielberg is resolutely old-fashioned in his movie-making, not reliant on slow-mo and overly fast editing: he takes things one at a time and lets the action play out, and this is refreshing.

I’d like to object to the fact that the movie doesn’t open with that series staple, the set piece that’s the climax to a previous, unseen adventure. It half-heartedly nods in that direction, but the opening is nowhere as fun as the other three films.

For the most part, though, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a diverting romp with some familiar, friendly old faces. Save for that movie’s still unbeatable opening sequence in a Shanghai nightclub, I’d say it bests Temple of Doom, but doesn’t come close to the heights of Raiders of the Lost Ark, or even Last Crusade. Still, lowered expectations really pay off here; Crystal Skull is a pleasant surprise.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the
Crystal Skull opens today, Thursday, May 22

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