Even Steven

A friend was watching the trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in a movie theater, and in the darkness, to much laughter, someone yelled at the screen, “Don’t destroy my childhood!” Relax: your childhood’s safe. It may suffer from a script that’s both overstuffed and underdeveloped, but at its best—in happily preposterous action scenes staged with speed-demon verve, punctuated by slapstick punchlines—the jolly Indiana Jones offers the pleasure of a master horsing around with a long-stored train set, tickled to see he can still make the thing run.

When Steven Spielberg eventually slows down long enough for anyone to get a handle on his entire body of work—it has to happen, right?—the fourth Indiana Jones adventure may be the key that unlocks the whole trove. That’s not to say it’s the best of his movies, or even of the series that started with 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, that jubilant, damn near flawless salute to Golden Age Hollywood and a youth misspent at the movies. Compared to Raiders, Indiana Jones is hobbled off the bat by a crucial element it could never recapture—surprise. But as a revisiting of favorite motifs, movies and gambits, it’s not a desecration but a playful (if bumpy) celebration.

The director winks at the pressure to deliver in the very first shot. If the Paramount logo morphed into a mountain in the 1981 original, here it dissolves into a molehill—a prairie-dog burrow in the New Mexico desert, near a nuclear testing site. A clever opening sequence with hot-rodding teens racing an apparent U.S. military convoy sets the tone, conjuring blithe heartland innocence under peril from wrathful invaders. One sneak attack and several bodies later, a car pulls up outside a vast warehouse, withdrawing a rumpled captive surrounded by a dozen twitchy guards. A familiar fedora falls to the ground. The captive’s hand lifts it to its rightful place off-screen, casting an iconic shadow on the car.

It’s a splendid entrance, the kind of myth-making screen shorthand the director excels in, and Harrison Ford shoulders it with his usual grouchy gravitas. A little slower and less pain-resistant than in the salad days of his earlier adventures (“We were younger”), his Indy nonetheless bristles when his Commie captors order him to search the warehouse for a stored artifact with coveted supernatural powers. (No, not that one, although its cameo is one of many bright throwaway gags.) The action sequence that follows is a pip: a melee of careening Jeeps, whizzing bullets and whip-swinging derring-do, orchestrated with Spielberg’s coolly omniscient eye for both the minute particulars and the sweeping layout of a complex set piece.

After an escape through a pastel ghost suburb mocked up for an A-bomb test—an amusingly macabre evocation of atom-age terror, and an image so emblematically Spielberg it’s a wonder to see it arrive this far into his career—Indy is called to the aid of a brilliant colleague (John Hurt, in delectable nutty-professor mode) held captive in the Amazonian jungle. Accompanied by a teenage troublemaker whose name, Mutt, hints at his uncertain parentage (cough, cough), the aging adventurer comes into collision once again with his New Mexico foes, led by a KGB scientist, Irina Spalko, who’s a desexed cartoon of Soviet severity.

Spielberg and David Koepp (the credited screenwriter on work that went through many hands, and yet not quite enough of them) devise grand entrances for all these characters. As Mutt, reigning teen heartthrob Shia LaBoeuf comes roaring in on a chopper in an outlandish Marlon Brando get-up, getting a laugh with just the ostentatious cock of his cap. Even better is the intro handed to Cate Blanchett as Indy’s nemesis Spalko. Wielding opium-fiend shades and a Pottsylvania accent, outfitted in a Halloween costume as Olga, She-Wolf of the KGB, the most physically exacting of contemporary actresses makes a hilarious first impression with her coatrack posture and bowl-cut bangs.

From both characters, alas, first impressions are practically all you get. Mutt’s intended as a lippy Indy Jr., an upstart with the old man’s disdain for the rules, but the gangly, cuddly LaBoeuf’s halfhearted rebel act makes your average High School Musical ingénue look like a cutthroat in a Peckinpah cantina. Even so, he fares better than Blanchett, who seems ready to soar into high-camp dragon-lady orbit but has little to do except race around and point. The movie begs for more direct animosity—or even, heaven forbid, a hint of sexual tension and kinky attraction—between her and Indy, but Blanchett gets to play little more than one flat note of comic-strip villainy, and a low note at that.

If Indiana Jones has one persistent failing, it’s at the script level. Even when the Nazis took a smoke break in Raiders, Lawrence Kasdan’s zippy movie-movie dialogue sustained our delight: He kidded the gobbledygook exposition in Saturday-afternoon serials but harkened back to the tradition of Casablanca and To Have and Have Not whenever a situation called for a ripe bon mot. Sadly, the talk in Indiana Jones has all the gobbledygook and none of the zip. It falls to Indy and Mutt to deliver the laborious mythology of the titular Crystal Skulls—a nod to the ’50s other great bogeyman, space invaders—in large indigestible hunks of lousy dialogue. Poor Ford and LaBoeuf—they sound less like racing scientific minds than exasperated suburbanites deciphering an IKEA instruction manual. And while the movie heralds the return of Marian Ravenwood, Raiders’ spunky sweetheart, the welcome Karen Allen rarely gets a good line. It’s partly the script’s fault she comes off so shrilly when introduced.