Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Paramount Pictures, 122mins, PG-13 

 
Directed by

Steven Spielberg

 

This is what they call “critic proof.” Nobody’s going to stop anyone from seeing “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” because we’ve been waiting for it since before anyone outside of Arkansas knew who the heck Hillary Clinton was. Indiana Jones is part of our collective unconscious, and only had George Lucas produced a genuine piece of shit would everyone who had once been a twelve-year-old boy or dated one would be going.
 

That said, let’s get to the bad news first: George Lucas nearly produced a genuine piece of shit. The script is for the most part below par. There are plot holes the size of a battleship, bad clichés upon bad clichés, and the penultimate scene doesn’t make any sense. However, there’s good news too…

 Steven Spielberg his cast and crew have managed to do the impossible. They took this sucker and wrestled it to the ground in such a way that not only has Indy been redeemed, the rest of the movie is entertaining.

This is the kind of thing that Lucas and Spielberg did back in the 1970s, and Quentin Tarintino failed at a couple of years ago with “Grindhouse.” Bring back the experience of moviewatching that we had back when we were kids and saw all this stuff for the first time.

It’s done in such a way that you don’t CARE that the plot’s dumb as a post, this is an amusement park ride, and as such is almost perfect.
 

It’s 1957, and they show us by having kids in a hot rod with Elvis on the radio. It’s cute and funny and completely misdirecting, for they want us to look at the wrong people. The right people are an entire platoon of Soviets led by the evil Col. Dovchenko(Igor Jijikine) and his fearless leader, Irina Spalko(Cate Blanchett) psychic chantuse and all around baddie have kidnapped Indy(Harrison Ford, obviously) and his sidekick "Mac" McHale(Ray Winstone) and force them into a warehouse in Utah, where the remains of the Roswell incident are housed.  This leads to a nuclear explosion and Indy getting fired from his tenured position as a suspected Commie,

 

He’s about to leave for points unknown, when he’s accosted by a Marlon Brando clone named Mutt Williams(Shia LaBeouf), who tells him that his mother Marion Ravenwood(Karen Allen) and a certain Professor Oxley( John Hurt) have been kidnapped by bad guys and she sent him a coded message. So after that there’s nothing but chases, chases and more chases, Irina and her Commie army want the maguffin really bad in order to brainwash the world or something like that there, but who cares about that? This is all about chases, swordfights, giant ants and multiple Amazon waterfalls. In other words, this is a popcorn movie of the highest order, and while it might give you a slight headache when you try to analyze it on the way home, you’ll have a wonderful time while you’re at the theater.