INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL

Superhuman Ford lessens the fun

By DAVID WILDMAN

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The big question on everyone's mind regarding this new Indiana Jones film was what kind of effect Harrison Ford's advanced age would have. The surprising answer is that weirdly, little has changed. We get the same high-wire, death-defying wall-to-wall action scenes that have defined the franchise from the beginning. But there is something crucial missing.

The early films cleverly played against the implausibility of it all by portraying our hero as this beleaguered but driven everyman, making it up as he went along and relying on luck and grit to get by. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas knew they were balancing on the precipice of the audience's suspension of disbelief, so they had fun with it.

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, however, gives us the ultimate reality buster: Our hero is pushing 70, something the camera can't hide. Rather than play with that obvious fact, the film tries to ignore it, destroying the veneer of realism that used to anchor the series. To go through the monumental physical exertions he does in this latest film, never once becoming winded, Indy would have to be some sort of superhuman, and that defeats the entire point of what made the character interesting and compelling in the first place.

It's too bad, because parts of the film really work well, particularly some of the impressive set pieces. The opening sequence is up to early Raiders' standards: Indy is captured by Russians (the new Nazis) in Roswell, N.M., and is forced to lead them to the remains of an alien locked up in a giant government warehouse. Cate Blanchett is appropriately campy as psychic Russian scientist Irina Spalko. Indy battles his way out, only to arrive in a fake town set up in the middle of the desert to test the effects of an experimental nuclear blast. He survives by climbing into a lead-lined refrigerator just as the A-bomb goes off. The scenes at the end of the film where they find a lost city in Peru are also spectacular and nearly as good as anything the franchise has done to date.

But while the idea of bringing the story into the Cold War 1950s is an inspired one, and seems to open up endless possibilities, nothing much is done with it beyond a somewhat rote Incas, aliens and commies storyline. Indy teams up with Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf), a standard Brando wannabe, tough talking but sensitive. His mother (Karen Allen) and his friend, Professor Oxley (John Hurt), an old buddy of Indy's, have been captured by bad guys somewhere in South America, so the two fly down to save them. In between the action David Koepp's clunky screenplay reduces Ford to dully reciting reams of backstory that the writer is trying to cram through in short order: "Whoever brings the crystal skull to the city of gold shall control its power ..." That's bad enough, but when Indy isn't mechanically spewing plotpoints his character's tone changes from scene to scene without apparent reason. First, he's lecturing Mutt in a sort of fatherly way, and then moments later, he's jaded and crusty. When Marion, Indy's old flame, shows up, his face betrays actual joy. It's a moment of honest humanity that seems like an outtake from a different film. For her part, Allen is reduced to a one-dimensional caricature—her only function is to go gaga over Indy after first engaging in some perfunctory arguing.

The joke I had in mind before this film came out was that it should be Indy's ultimate battle: Indiana Jones and The Wheelchair of Death. But that was assuming the writers were willing to develop characteristics of actual human beings here. No such luck.

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL

RATED | PG-13

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