The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the latest and easily the worst chapter of the Indiana Jones saga. The movie's plot is nearly as undecipherable as ancient Mayan ideographs, and is coupled with unrelenting, moronic action that pins the viewer somewhere between amusement at the preposterousness of it all and a desire for escape. It is a clumsy mishmash of previous, actually entertaining films by Steven Spielberg (who directed Crystal Skull) and George Lucas (who wrote the story upon which the movie is based) grafted Frankenstein-like onto an absurd tale that may well have been salvaged from the X-Files' rubbish bin.
The plot centers on the delivery of a crystal alien skull to the legendary land of El Dorado. Indiana Jones (played, of course, by Harrison Ford) is being pursued by the KGB, led by Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), who have infiltrated America with the goal of enlisting Indy to help them locate the Crystal Skull, a weapon so powerful the Commies could use it to paint the whole world red. Mutt Williams (Shia Lebeouf) tags along as Indy's young sidekick and heir apparent in more ways than one, and the flame kindled between Marion Ravenwood (the preternaturally grinning and playful Karen Allen) in Raiders of the Lost Ark is reignited.
After opening with a bang of historic proportions and the kind of classic adventure we've come to expect from the Indy Jones franchise, the film slogs through an hour of exposition that drew more yawns than laughs from the viewing audience. When the familiar airplane travel montage sends Indy and Mutt down to South America in pursuit of adventure, the pace rapidly accelerates, and the action sequences are smashed together so tightly there's barely time to squeeze a one-liner in edgewise.
There's even a brain-washed adventurer, Professor Oxley (John Hurt) who preceded Indy through the booby-traps and puzzles, a useful plot device to insure the action never lets up. If Indy's too busy wasting time trying to piece things together, then that's one less car chase, and we'd maybe have to do without the idiotic Tarzan scene, the flesh eating bugs, the sword fight, and the obligatory blood-thirsty savages. Sure, the previous trilogy of Indy films were also action packed, but the action in those movies was more intricately paced, more believable, more creative, and possessed greater tension.
There are, however, two redeeming things about The Crystal Skull: Ford and Allen. Seeing Ford flash the bullwhip, hearing the "thwump" of his fists against a Commie jaw, and watching him slip right back into a character he hasn't portrayed in nearly twenty years is a source of giddy nostalgic willies. Allen looks like she's having so much fun hamming it up that it's hard not to smile along with her. And you have to hand it to Lebeouf, who isn't half bad as a switch-blade toting greaser sidekick.
Legend has it that Lucas wrote Crystal Skull around the same time as he did The Last Crusade. He also wrote The Phantom Menace prior to producing the original three Star Wars films. After seeing Lucas's last four travesties of both film and storytelling, I am convinced that everything he ever wrote of any quality was filmed prior to 1989 when The Last Crusade was released. I also believe that any and all scripts, stories, treatments or ideas scribbled on a cocktail napkins he has squirreled away in some crannie of Skywalker Ranch should be seized – hopefully in an entertaining act of derring-do – and tossed into an action-packed bonfire before he has the notion to actually produce those films and once more pilfer several million dollars from the naively trustworthy theatre-going public.
