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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull |
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Posted on
12:00 p.m. PST June 5, 2008 |
Posted by Ty Burr May 18, 2008 01:58 PM
By Ty Burr
Globe staff
*** (three stars)
No, it’s not as good as “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Don’t be
silly. Lightning can’t be bottled twice, no matter how
skilled the vintners.
Instead, Steven Spielberg's “Indiana Jones
 and
the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” is merely grand old-school
fun – a rollicking class reunion that stands as the second
best entry in the venerable series. Premiering Sunday at the
Cannes Film Festival and opening worldwide on Thursday, the
new movie is leagues better than 1984’s nasty “Indiana Jones
and the Temple of Doom” and blessed with more snap and heart
– more fun – than 1989’s pro forma “Indiana Jones and the
Last Crusade.” All that's lacking is a genuine sense of
surprise. It's very possible that was left out on purpose.
The emphasis in “Crystal Skull” is on old-fashioned
stuntwork rather than the shiny chimeras of modern digital
effects. When Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) catapults from
the back of a motorcycle through the window of a speeding
car, out the opposite window and back onto the motorcycle –
his feet nervously skitching along the roadbed – at least
half the excitement is knowing that motorcycle, car, Ford,
and road are real.
Thankfully, the approach goes only so far. Character and
star may have aged two decades since the last installment,
but bullets still miss the good guys with astonishing
regularity, and Indiana Jones may be the only person who
could escape a desert nuclear test site with an A-bomb due
to land in ten seconds. How he manages this makes no blessed
sense, but it’s a hoot anyway.
That scene occurs in the movie’s first fifteen minutes, in
the sort of fast-charging prologue Spielberg and producer
George Lucas know we’re expecting. The sequence also
establishes the time (1957), the enemy (Russian Communists),
and the stakes (power over all of mankind – the usual).
Better, it reintroduces Indy as a believably older but still
absurdly capable figure out of a Saturday matinee serial,
and it brings on Cate Blanchett as Irina Spalko, a Red
menace with a sword, a Louise Brooks bob, and a nifty accent
by way of Natasha in the old “Rocky and Bullwinkle”
cartoons. “Drop dead, comrade,” the hero sneers at Irina,
and that’s a good description of the best “Indiana Jones”
villain yet: She’s a drop-dead comrade.
To sum up the plot of “Crystal Skull” requires dancing
around a number of spoilers, so stop reading now if you want
to go in with a clean slate. What Spalko and her KGB minions
are after is a rare and very strange crystal skull that
legends say was stolen from El Dorado, the lost city of gold
in Peru. One of Indiana’s colleagues, Professor Oxley (John
Hurt), has set out to find it and disappeared, and a young
man named Mutt (Shia LeBeouf) arrives to beg Jones to rescue
his old friend.
This being the 50s, Mutt is first seen riding a motorcycle
with his cap akimbo just like Marlon Brando in “The Wild
One.” He’s a preppie who has dropped out to become a greaser
instead of a beatnik, and the sequence in which he and
Indiana careen through the college campus (inside the
library and out) with Russians in high-speed pursuit is an
early high point.
It’s bookended later in the film by a delirious action set
piece involving multiple jeeps, a sheer cliff face, monkeys,
vines, and a ravenous army of giant ants. (This last leads
to one of the few gross-out scenes in “Skull,” which is
noticeably less gruesome than the other sequels. It’s still
a bit too spooky in places for young children.)
The basic structure of these action scenes hasn’t change in
20 years, but camera technology and Spielberg’s skill at
deploying it have. There’s an organic smoothness to the
mayhem that can take your breath away, so much so that the
less inspired aspects of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of
the Crystal Skull” stick out more clearly.
It’s wonderful, for instance, to see Karen Allen reprise her
role as Marion Ravenwood from “Raiders,” since her warmth
was precisely what was missing from the first two sequels.
(Let us now officially forget all about Kate Capshaw and the
unfortunate Alison Doody.) The script doesn’t give Allen
quite enough to do, though, and the family dynamics that
take over the last third of the movie feel overly familiar.
Indeed, a number of Spielberg career threads are woven into
“Skull,” including a climactic shot that blatantly rehashes
the finale of one of the director’s best-loved early films.
While Ford wears the fedora with believably weathered
panache, on some level this Indy seems smaller, less
archetypal than his younger incarnation. Where the character
once towered over these movies, now he’s just the leader of
the pack.
The rest of the cast keeps pace – Ray Winstone as an
accomplice who may or may not be a betrayer, Jim Broadbent
taking over for the late Denholm Elliott as Indy’s college
friend. LeBoeuf has an interesting alertness that he still
hasn’t figured out how to use as an actor, but he throws
himself into the stuntwork like a proper student at the feet
of the masters.
It bears asking, though: What do we want from an “Indiana
Jones” movie in 2008? Engaged nostalgia, I think, and on
that level “Crystal Skull” delivers. Some may be
disappointed that Spielberg and company haven’t invested the
series with the latest in computer boffinry or that the new
movie treads comfortably (sometimes too comfortably) in the
footsteps of its forebears. This isn’t a reinvention but a
reunion, of characters, creators, even techniques. “Same old
same old,” Jones says at one point, and that’s what we get.
The action may have been updated to the 1950s, but in ways
both inspired and unexamined, “Indiana Jones” remains
happily stuck in the 80s.
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Original Review Link |
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