It’s not the years, it’s the mileage

By Matthew Scott Hunter

Thursday, May 22, 2008 | 1:04 p.m.

I’ll just come right out and admit it: I’m typing this review in a battered fedora. Having been born in the late ’70s, I’m not old enough to have experienced the serials that inspired Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I am old enough to recognize that every adventure movie since has been inspired by that film. So when it comes to action, Raiders is my alpha, and for 19 years, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade has been my omega. Until now. I asked my editor to let me review Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the fourth installment in the series, before it even had a title, and in the year since, I’ve dreamed that it might be my cinematic holy grail and worried that it might roll over me like a giant boulder. As it turns out, the reality is somewhere in between.

The belated sequel’s intro ushers Indy into the atomic era with a bang. There are drag-racing teenagers, evil commies and the cookie-cutter housing of an Ozzie and Harriet utopia (which, as an Indiana Jones set-piece, is destined for over-the-top demolition). The opening events unfold at a leisurely pace. By the time Indy would normally be making his airborne escape, sans the artifact he sought, he’s still swapping sarcastic one-liners with the villainess (a terrific, scenery-chewing Cate Blanchett as Russian mind-control expert Irina Spalko).

Director Steven Spielberg knows we’ve waited 19 years to see Indy back in action, and he doesn’t mind building that anticipation further, taking time to poke fun at how Harrison Ford is over the hill, then delivering a series of stunts that show us just how much hill Ford has left to scale. The old-school chases and fistfights get the audience back into the spirit of the series, which makes the lull that follows that much more frustrating.

One after another, we’re given a military debriefing, a return to Indy’s college, the obligatory “We’re all getting older” nostalgia scene and a malt shop-set plot primer, courtesy of series newcomer Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf as a greaser, toying alternately with a switchblade and a comb and looking much more natural with the latter). Considering the sheer tonnage of exposition, it’s remarkable how little we understand the details of the impending quest. The titular MacGuffin has some sort of undefined power, which can be claimed by returning the object to the mythical lost city from which it was stolen. After one more narrow escape from the reds, hero and new sidekick leave behind the homage to the 1950s and head off to the Amazon for some good old-fashioned tomb-raiding.

Once the action sets in, it seldom lets up. Ford still throws and takes a convincing punch, but the stunt work doesn’t weigh as heavily on his shoulders as it did in previous entries, thanks to some CG trickery. I’m not as much of a Luddite or green-screen-phobe as some action purists, but Spielberg and producer George Lucas promised us a minimal amount of computer effects, and it’s safe to say that that promise is disappointingly and substantially broken. Made two decades ago, the previous Indy films had the tone of their action scenes set by the constraints of the physical effects of that era. The problem with digital animation is that it makes anything possible, and without conscious restraint, filmmakers are free to have actors perform impossible feats alongside an army of cartoon monkeys. Ugh—more on that in a minute.

Consider a scene late in the film in which the Russkies are rappelling down a cliff to reach a vast river, and our heroes decide to take a shortcut. They drive their amphibious vehicle right off the cliff and land entangled in the branches of a massive tree, which bends under their weight until it’s low enough to deposit the vehicle safely into the water—at which point the tree whips back toward the rock face, sending several of the Russians plummeting toward their doom. There have been stunts in previous Indiana Jones films that were extremely implausible (Temple of Doom’s mine cart jumping a gap in the track comes to mind), but none so large in scale and effortless in execution.

In true fanboy fashion, I tried my damnedest to suspend disbelief through these moments, but then came the soul-crushing dealbreaker. During a jeep chase through the jungle, Mutt is swept up into a tree by a stray vine. Trapped in the rainforest canopy, he locks eyes with dozens of digital monkeys while the vehicles below race away going at least 40 mph. Then, with the expertise of Olympic gold medalist Johnny Weissmuller in the old 1930s Tarzan films, he begins swinging from vine to vine until he overtakes the speeding vehicles, and his army of monkeys (which has inexplicably accompanied him) attacks the bad-guy vehicle.

Have you ever introduced a new girlfriend to your group of longtime friends? Maybe you’re not quite sure about her, but you want to like her, and you certainly want your friends to approve, but then she says or does something so embarrassing, offensive and downright stupid that you know what your friends are going to say, and you don’t even want to apologize for it because there’s no excuse. I can take the overuse of digital effects, and I can handle the limp return of Indy’s old flame (Karen Allen in an extended cameo), and I can ignore the sea of CG ants and the way they rip off the scarabs from The Mummy (already a rip-off of Indiana Jones), and I can even come to terms with Crystal Skull’s sci-fi flavor, which occasionally seems to reach beyond the tonal parameters set by the earlier films. After all, there’s nothing wrong with broadening a franchise’s horizons—even after 19 years. But an army of monkeys? This is not a scene from Indiana Jones. This is a scene from George of the Jungle.

Some may accuse me of having expectations that are too great, but they were no greater than my dogged determination to love this film no matter what. (Damn those monkeys!) Non-fans probably won’t take it so hard, but I desperately coveted this sequel for the better part of my life, and after 19 years, I’m walking away without the treasure I sought. Then again, I suppose the same thing happens to Indiana Jones at the end of each of his adventures.