Whip-cracking hero Indiana Jones makes a welcome return to fight the Cold War in the heat of the jungle, says Sukhdev Sandhu
Jaws, E T, Empire of the Sun: for my money, the Indiana Jones films, especially Raiders of the Lost Ark, have been Steven Spielberg's finest achievement. They drew on adventure serials from the Thirties and Forties, dollops of buccaneering fun in which discreetly moustachioed heroes with impeccable manners hoofed it to the Great Unknown (basically, anywhere outside America) in search of treasure and action.
They tethered the director's barely rivalled command of action and pacing to stories that were rich in comedy and as likely to appeal to women as to men. Indy was closer in spirit to Cary Grant than he was to Rocky, Rambo or John McClane, those gruff, weight-pumping knuckleheads who passed for heroes in the Eighties.
Nostalgia, especially when it's manufactured by a movie-studio marketing department, is a horrid thing. Still, it's rather nice to have the Indiana Jones franchise dusted down and revived. Perhaps Spielberg, who from Schindler's List in 1993 to Munich in 2005 has been mining darker, more politically complex fare, wants to flex his family-entertainment muscles again?
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull takes us back again to the past. But this isn't the past of Biggles or Flash Gordon, but of the Cold War.
The film starts in 1957 as Jones is captured by Soviet agents, led by Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), a black-gloved cross between Louise Brooks and Magenta De Vine who sports the kind of glacially erotic accent last heard in von Sternberg's Shanghai Express (1932), and who works as a scientist specialising in the collection of paranormal materials to help her carry out psychic espionage.
What she's really after is the Crystal Skull of Akator, an artefact from a highly advanced, pre-Mayan civilisation that she intends to return to its tomb deep in a Peruvian jungle in order to unleash its immense power. Jones, having managed to escape a nuclear test blast by hiding inside a fridge, finds himself being fired at by KGB operatives, and fired from his archaeology professorship owing to suspicions planted by the CIA that he's a threat to national security.
Soon enough, he hooks up with a lively tearway called Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf), who revs into town like Marlon Brando in The Wild One, but turns out to be as soft as a kid out of Happy Days. Together they head for South America and a sustained bout of rummaging around tombs, wandering through corridors, and fighting off various freaky-gibbon-type things.
The first 40 minutes or so of the film, right from the moment we clap eyes on Jones's trademark brown fedora, are lean, delightful and terrifically handled. That fridge scene, in which Jones, having escaped his captors, unwittingly stumbles into an atomic site, is brilliantly conceived and genuinely frightening. A sustained chase through the streets and sometimes the college lawns of an Ivy League college whets the appetite for more.
But then, almost as soon it hits the jungle, the film veers off course.
No one's expecting the storyline to be anything more than an occasion for a series of helter-skelter, seat-of-the-pants adventures, so it's a pity that it gets rather bogged down in unnecessarily complicated and not very exciting jaw-jaw about ancient codes, dark spirits and lost tribes.
It's probably not the fault of David Koepp, who wrote the screenplay; more likely, it's down to George Lucas, who conceived the story alongside Jeff Nathanson and, as recent Star Wars films have shown, has a propensity for woozy mysticism.
The result is that too many characters get short-changed. John Hurt's elderly and brain-fogged archaeologist wanders around uttering bleating noises but not really maximising the power of the skull he's holding. Ray Winstone, as duplicitous pal Mac, resembles a porked-up Leslie Phillips, but does little more than plummily cry out "Jonesy!" every so often.
It's the female characters who are most AWOL. The return of Karen Allen as love interest Marion Ravenwood is hurried through so quickly that the two don't have the time to flirt and squabble to any endearing degree. And Blanchett, who looks fabulously extra-terrestrial and would have been a superb sparring partner, is confined after the first half hour to fighting and chasing sequences.
Harrison Ford himself is absolutely fine. He's craggier than before, and certainly a little stiff when it comes to flashing his whip, but he's not at all bad here. The script makes things easier for him, acknowledging his age - "It's not as easy as it used to be… We were younger," he admits to Mac at the very outset - as well as delegating the more energetic moves to Mutt, who, towards the end, is almost proffered to the audience as the next Indiana Jones.
That won't work. Ford, in his late thirties when this franchise began, brought a droll maturity to the role that the callow LaBeouf lacks.
And the franchise? Well, countless films from The Mummy to Spy Kids have aped elements of Spielberg's style. The likes of Speed Racer have upped the levels of manic excitement one might expect to experience at a movie theatre.
The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull isn't a let-down so much as an attempt, as much romantic as financially motivated, to make a sequel for a film series whose most intense charms were defined by the era from which it emerged. A further sequel may well be impossible, even for a director as ambitious as Spielberg.
