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Lost City Raiders
Nineteen years after their Last Crusade, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Harrison Ford exhume everybody's favourite whip-wielding archaeologist
After years of rumour, speculation and false starts, the long wait by the devoted fans of a beloved fantasy trilogy is over. A new instalment arrives. You enter the darkened cinema, giddy with excitement and nerves. That rousing John Williams theme blasts forth. You surrender to the magic, high on precious memories - and then Jar Jar Binks dumps all over your dreams. It's fair to say a sizable, predominantly 1980s-generation audience, badly burned by the Star Wars prequels, awaits Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull with as much trepidation as anticipation. Two decades on, with a leading man a year off his bus pass and CG-inflated action blockbusters two-a-penny, can George Lucas and Steven Spielberg really keep up with their own previous Joneses? Lucas, given his track record with Star Wars Episodes I, II and III, one can legitimately doubt; Ford, too. Despite iconic Han Solo and Indy stints, his career has to be one of the most disappointingly safe and lazy of all modern movie stars. But allied with Spielberg, whose success ratio far outstrips them both, the trio have pulled it off. Raiders is no lost art: Indy's back. Sure he's showing the years and the mileage, the action updated to 1957, but the film's wry acknowledgment of time's passing is deftly done. The sidekick, young greaser Mutt Williams (LaBeouf), allows for some neat age-gap gags; and our heroine is Indy's oldest - and best - flame, Marion Ravenwood (Allen) from Raiders Of The Lost Ark who brings some much-needed relationship traction. Okay, it's clearer than ever when the stuntmen take over, but Ford can still trade punches and one-liners with the best of them. In fact, he hasn't been this sprightly or engaging in years. This is his role, his show and it fits him as perfectly as a battered Fedora. It helps that David Koepp's screenplay, working from a story by Lucas and Jeff Nathanson, is the most intriguing since the original Ark of the Covenant gambit. The Cold War setting brings those long-forgotten villains, the Russians, back into play. Led by relentless mind-control acolyte Irina Spalko (Blanchett), the Russkies force Dr Jones and his pal Mac (Winstone) to identify a crate they helped unearth 10 years prior, now stored in the Nevada desert's notorious Area 51. A series of revelations lead to a fabled lost city deep in the Amazon, once sought by Indy's erstwhile colleague Professor Oxley (Hurt), and the Crystal Skull of the title, an elongated, pure-quartz headpiece, evidently not shaped by human hands. Anyone recalling the more fanciful alternative propositions for this fourth outing, such as 'Indiana Jones And The Saucer Men From Mars', suddenly realizes the powers-that-be weren't necessarily joking. Sci-fi tropes aside, what's most enjoyable about the film is its back-to-basics, old school feel. Indiana Jones was always a tribute to those 1930s cliff-hanger serials so beloved by Lucas and Spielberg, honoured (and buffed up by millions of dollars) by the physicality of the ingenious stunts, the elaborate, labyrinthine sets and Spielberg's exuberant but never disorientating editing style. There's a very funny quicksand set-piece and an epic jungle jeep chase that's the match of any action sequence from the first three films. It's only when things obviously diverge from the formula, notably in the digital effects-heavy climax, that things start to feel, well, alien. Ultimately, Indiana Jones, and arguably Spielberg's entire oeuvre, all come back to family. It's what underpins even the most far-fetched or cornball stretches here and why the series' least successful characters, Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom's Willie Scott or, here, Winstone's ill-defined Mac, fail dismally. For a couple of hours, Spielberg, Ford and Co create that sense of shared community so under threat in the modern age of fragmented, multi-media bombardment and divisive political paranoia (alluded to in the film's commie witch-hunt strand). It won't kick the reds or any other infiltrators out from under the bed, but it'll send you off to sleep with a smile on your face, reliving those moments of movie magic over in your dreams. Verdict An occasionally uneven but still spectacular return to form for one of cinema's true heroes. Welcome back, Dr Jones - we missed ya. |
