- Location: Uptown Theatre (DC)
- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a poorly scripted, somewhat tired knock-off of that archeology-adventure film series I liked when I was growing up...what was it called again?
- What to blame? Spielberg's name is on the director's chair, but the stink of George Lucas' Crayola-scrawled plots is pervasive. One might also blame 20 years of project development, but one could also imagine a much better movie resulting from so much planning. Some of the acting, notably by Cate Blanchett and Karen Allen, is fine, some is rather dull, but the characters and sequences are so flat that it doesn't really matter.
- The plot, hardly the most important part of any Indy film, revolves around powerful magnetic skulls that confer some sort of possibly psychic power upon whomever returns them to their point of origin. Presumably, you can collect the whole set and use them to stick things to the most damage-resistant refrigerator I've ever seen. Anyway, the bottom line is that the Russians want something, and Indy must stop them.
- Unfortunately, the manner by which Indy stops them is mostly boring. The fight and chase scenes from Raiders of the Lost Ark are unconditionally exciting even on the tenth viewing (trust me). In Crystal Skull, the campus motorcycle chase scene is pretty good, but most of the others fall flat. The choices that made the swordsman or fisticuffs confrontations of the first film so amusing are far too clever, so the mature Spielberg and Lucas employ punching instead. Even Indy's tried and true whip is rarely used, although they do succeed in appropriately fetishizing the fedora.
- I love the idea of adventure serials but, just as Lucas did with the recent Star Wars series, Spielberg has forgotten to include the fun. I'll take the originals any day.
