"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"

Ancient discovery

“Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”

by Jimmy So

Much of movie-going is about expectations. What hopes and aspirations hang upon “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”? Do we dare expect a repeat to the good times of the first three Indy installments, a return to the bullwhip market of the nineteen-eighties? “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981) and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989) were like two epic shopping sprees — Indiana Jones already has a fedora, a whip and a disapproval of snakes hissing at him, and he wants that Ark of Covenant and the Holy Grail, too. “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (1984) wasn’t about consumerism, but you remember the props more than the characters—monkey brains, arthropods, and a mine cart. What would “Crystal Skull” give us? The title sounds about as exciting as a snow globe. What the first three of the franchise had was zing. If anybody can make snow globes zingy, it’d be them—them being Steven Spielberg (director), George Lucas (producer) and Harrison Ford (star). Right? But if you gave me a crystal skull, I would turn around and sell it at the nearest flea market for four dollars and ninety-nine cents. They make a ton of them in Mexico. The skulls that are claimed to be pre-Columbian have been found to be fakes. So there, this MacGuffin is even weaker than the Sankara Stones in “Temple of Doom.”

It’s 1957, nineteen years after “Last Crusade,” allowing Indy to age in real time, off the silver screen. Age he did, and more on that later. But for the first scene, Speilberg opens with some young preppies hot-rodding in the Nevada desert, “Hound Dog” playing on the car radio. They run into a convoy of what appears to be American soldiers. It’s an encouraging tease, the meeting of the playful and the severe that could bring surprise to the franchise once again. It gets even better: the convoy turns off the main road, Elvis fades out, and the appearance of youthful naivete gives way to Cold War sinisterness. Unfortunately, that’s the entire duration of the good promise: three minutes. It turns out that the convoy is made up of disguised Soviet agents who look ridiculously despotic, and without Little Richard there to Tutti their Fruitty, the fun stops there. It gets worse: Indiana Jones enters the picture, and the moment Ford is thrown out of the trunk of a car and onto “Crystal Skull,” a drudging sluggishness overcomes the movie. It wouldn’t leave until the film is over, since Ford is in almost every frame.

Everything and everyone that comes after are simply additional ways to annoy an already grumpy Ford, including rapier-toting and forced-Russian-accent-spouting Soviet colonel Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), who has kidnapped Indy and brought him to Hangar 51, the warehouse you first saw at the conclusion of “Raiders,” where the Ark of the Covenant was stored. Also stashed in the stockroom is an alien corpse picked up by the American government in Roswell. I’m glad that Indy hasn’t wasted the past nineteen years—he’s found time to add astrobiology to his archaelogy resume. Indiana Jones chasing aliens? And that’s not even his most impressive feat. He escapes from Spalko’s grip and survives a nuclear test blast by hiding in a refrigerator. If this is beginning to sound unbearably silly, you’re in good shape and probably not an ufologist. Indy then returns to his college, is forced to leave, and meets a greaser named Mutt Williams, played by Shia LaBeouf. If you only know one thing about “Crystal Skull” before you see it, it’d be that LaBeouf would play Indiana Jones’ son. So, there he is, Mutt supposedly being Indy’s son—a very suspicious claim because, clearly, LaBeouf inherited no acting genes from Ford. The nonsense plot somehow involves finding “the crystal skull of Akator” before Spalko gets to it, and Indy and Mutt have to return the giant Swarovski paperweight to a temple in the Amazon.

The thing with great B-movies is they’re only bad in the right parts. The trick is to limit the damage that fiscal conservatism can do. So, by all means, be stingy on that mannequin you use as a corpse. Make good time and scrap that fight scene; just have your star shoot the sucker instead of wasting half a day with choreographing the damn thing. Do two takes. One if you can. But you can’t skimp on the human condition. There has to be genuine fun or fear. The script has to accommodate characters. You have to do a good job casting. The first three Indy films were at least good B-movies (“Raiders” was a great B-movie). Spielberg understood how to make bad on the right areas. But nineteen years can make you forget, and “Crystal Skull” is a mess. Indy’s dubious discourse on the crystal skull leads me to wonder if professors can be declared academically ineligible. Even Allison Doody, who’s not exactly a tenured acting legend, was significantly more fun and menacing in “Last Crusade” than no less a renowned thespian as Blanchett in “Crystal Skull.” How is it possible for any director to make Blanchett ridiculous and tiresome in any movie? Slap a bob cut on her and call it a character and Spielberg has done just that.

And if you can admit it, the fatal flaw with “Crystal Skull” is Harrison Ford. Middle age has sucked all the fun out of that actor. How did the man who brought us Bob Falfa and Jack Trainer (quick, name the movies—OK, so maybe Ford won’t be remembered for much else besides Han Solo and Indy) become a real killjoy after he hit forty-five? Some genuine bitterness seeps onto the screen when he smirks, and it might be a good thing that “Crystal Skull” has little room for Ford to do anything but scowl. There’s not much difference between looking at Ford and looking at the crystal skull—there are altogether too many bloated, colorless and ancient noggins in this film, and little did we know that an Indiana Jones movie would remind us all of our mortality and decline when we expected unbridled fun and exotic thrills. Maybe it’s our fault; you can’t say “Crystal Skull” didn’t warn you what it was about when Indy and his partner Mac quipped in the beginning of the film:

Mac: This ain’t going to be easy.

Indiana Jones: Not as easy as it used to be.

Mac: Well, we've been through worse.

Jones: Yah, when?

Mac: Flensburgh. There was twice as many.

Jones: We were younger.

Mac: I still am young!

Jones: We had guns. Put your hands down, will you; you're embarrassing us. ♦