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From the Wall Street Journal:
Near the very end of the very nearly interminable "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," an old colleague of Indy's who has been half-mad and speaking gibberish suddenly turns lucid and philosophical. "How much of human life," he muses, "is waiting." How true, how true. Sitting through Steven Spielberg's slog down memory lane means waiting for surprise, waiting for delight, waiting for daylight after turgid trudges through Peruvian caves, and waiting for an abstract story to coalesce. Most of all it means waiting, in vain, for the sort of dazzle, dash and clarity that made us love the series in the first place.
It's been 27 years since the first installment and 19 years since the last one: Harrison Ford, still snapping Indy's whip at the age of 65, is no longer a whippersnapper. He's not the problem, though. Both the actor and the character draw on deep reservoirs of goodwill. You want them to be wonderful from the moment Indy makes his entrance -- actually he's preceded by a witty shot of his fedora -- and it's great to see him looking like a grizzled desert rat with a glowering smirk, or, moments later, a smirky glower. (The film, set in the 1950s, is distinguished by witty entrances, if little else: Cate Blanchett's villainous Soviet agent, Irina, looking like Garbo in "Ninotchka," Shia LaBoeuf's pompadoured biker, Mutt, looking like Brando in "The Wild One."
It's also touching to see Indy coping as well as he does -- very well indeed -- with the knock-down, drag-out challenges of being an action hero at an advanced age.
No, the problem is all around him, and it's movie fatigue, which can be just as damaging as metal fatigue. A couple of early set pieces dispense spasms of excitement at the expense of plausibility -- an atom-bomb test that trivializes the force of nuclear weapons for the sake of lame comedy, a chase that skids to an awkward finish in a university library. But then the movie, seemingly weary of itself, settles into a soporific succession of episodes having to do with a search for the skull of the title, plus extrasensory perception, extraterrestrials and, ever so fleetingly, flying saucers. All of it amounts to a been-there-done-that-better recapitulation of Mr. Spielberg's career.
One unwelcome surprise is the level of craftsmanship -- widely variable cinematography, continuity glitches, characterizations ranging from perfunctory to nil. (The script was written by David Koepp, while the story is credited to George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson.) Another is the level of performances. Ms. Blanchett, a movie star of rare intelligence and grace, gets to carry a sword, read minds, fight fights and strike one sultry pose after another, but she's only a decorative presence, and a charm-free one (though her character's mind eventually catches fire). It's good to see Karen Allen back as Marion Ravenwood, the love of Indy's earlier life; it would have been better if she'd had something livelier to do than drive an amphibious truck on a chase through trackless jungles. Mr. LaBoeuf, a manifestly talented young actor, isn't funny, and there's no sign of him having been helped by his director. Nor is there much excitement between him and Harrison Ford as they play out a relationship that's the movie's worst-kept secret.
The least surprising aspect of the lumbering production is its abuse of computer-generated images -- what were generally called special effects until they stopped being special. Even in that department, though, the banality is striking -- all those clattering digital ants and groaning stones. I was equally struck by the movie's disrespect for the physical world. Sure, computers can do anything these days, but do we want them to? There's no logic, and therefore less drama, in Indy's escape from a mock town that's about to be atom-bombed, or in that amphibious truck finally going over a series of stupendous waterfalls.
None of the complex CGI sequences in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" can hold a candle, in fact, to the moment when a conspicuously youthful Indy, confronted by a black-robed warrior chuckling ominously, watched and waited while the guy twirled his scimitar, then pulled out his revolver and simply popped him with no further ado. But that was a long time ago, in a film that feels far, far away.Are you sure you want to delete this post? Yes | No
