Indy Rules
Finally got to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and it rocks! I don’t know what all of the critics were complaining about, maybe the film isn’t dark and somber enough for them, if so I’m sure The Dark Knight will more than make up for it this July. For me from the minute when Harrison Ford and his buddy are surrounded by guns and he tells the other man to put his arms down because he is embarrassing them, I was hooked.
After a seemingly endless series of lackluster action films and thrillers, it is great to see Ford back in harness, the charm and charisma are still there, and like his cinematic father Sean Connery, he can still make a believable hero at a time when most men his age are preparing to take it easy from now on.
The film delivers everything you have come to expect from an Indiana Jones picture; great stunts, fist fights, care chases, creepy tomb raiding with death traps, and plenty of humorous exchanges along the way, best of all he gets to crack that whip several times in the course of the film. Some of the highlights include a car chase inside a warehouse, Indy’s clever escape from an atom bomb explosion using a major appliance of the 1950’s ( the image of him silhouetted against a mushroom cloud is an instantly iconic shot), crawling through two tombs, going over three consecutive waterfalls, having to be pulled out of quicksand with a snake for a rope, and Indy silhouetted against another classic 1950’s image that I don’t want to spoil for the few who haven’t seen the movie yet.
Of course one of the biggest highlights is the pairing of Karen Allen with Harrison Ford. Once she enters the film at about the halfway mark, where Ford and LaBeouf have wrung just about all they can from the buddy cop/teacher mentor motif they were doing, the film switches to domestic comedy in the face of danger with Ford and Allen bickering so much that even their Russian guard yells at them to shut up. Ford and Allen still have that great chemistry from the first film.
I can understand some of the complaints, it must have been off putting to see Indy engaging in a science fiction based story as opposed to a supernatural one, but the setting is the fifties and that suits the time period better than the late thirties and early forties, when supernatural horror was popular in films of the period, just as science fiction was the mainstay of fifties cinema. I don’t get the complaints about Cate Blanchett’s performance. It isn’t the one note stereotypical caricature critics have accused it of being, and I think her accent is well done. Maybe they just don’t like seeing a great actress doing what they consider a mindless popcorn film. I know why she did it, it’s the same reason that we all love Indy movies, at the end of the day, they’re just plain fun. And what’s wrong with that?
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