Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

The fourth and most recent installment of the Indiana Jones series again loses it's way. I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but I do want to point out (and counter) some of the problems I and others seem to have in the movie.

First, many have said that the scene where Indy survives a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator was incredibly unbelievable. I'm willing to buy it, just because that refrigerator was made from 2 inches of solid lead. That will protect you from quite a bit. And it's no less believable than using a self-inflating raft to safely coast down a mountain and off a cliff.

Shia LeBouf plays Mutt. While his acting was hardly high-caliber, his character was still endearing on many levels. As most "bad boys" in the 50s, he was a James Dean wannabe; a Rebel Without a Clue. His obsessive nature over his image was very believable as an adolescent young man that had no direction in his life. So not great, but not so bad as to be irredeemable.

I could even buy the man-eating ants in South America. I'd buy a lot of weird creatures from that region of the world. There is some seriously fucked up shit in the Amazon. Mother Nature was definitely PMSing when she populated that area.

Even the story itself wasn't terribly unbelievable. Both Russia and the US in the 1950s were studying telepathic warfare. Aliens have long been theorized to have had connections to the Mayans, given that their gods were white, and the pyramids they built sprung up in similar forms around the world, at about the same time. But yet, these things just aren't the Indiana Jones kind of stories. El Dorado is rich enough in legend and mystery that we didn't need to bring Science Fiction into the equation.

The legion of monkeys that come to our heroes' aid as Shia LeBouf leads them Tarzan-like through the trees was a little far-fetched. The fact that the skull was shown to be highly magnetic (even to non-magnetic metels like gold) seemed to come and go as it suited the story. Sometimes it effected weapons, wielded by good guys and bad guys alike. Other times, it conveniently didn't.

A lot the dialogue felt forced and unimagined, particularly a useless scene where Indy is arrested by a government agency. The entire scene does nothing but give us some exposition about how Indy was involved in WWII and got all kinds of medals and so on and so forth. This could have been easily covered in other ways and did not need a 5 minute scene.

Finally, the main antagonist, a Russian KGB scientist was two-dimensional, poorly acted, and just altogether thrown in as a villain without any depth or interest.

One thing that I got a huge kick out of, however, was Indy saying "I have a bad feeling about this". Star Wars references always make me feel warm and happy inside.

So, overall, this movie would have been fairly decent if it wasn't an Indiana Jones movie. Enjoyable action, fairly funny, however it was still very much flawed.

But honestly, anyone who says that it was the worst movie ever made, and that it ruined the Indiana Jones series and left it a broken mess should really go back and re-watch Indiana Jones and the Temple of Cheap Plot Devices. For me, I still found far and away better than the second movie, even it trailed the first and third installments by just as much.