Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Indiana Jones returns! In the forth installment that takes place 20 years after The Last Crusade, Dr. Jones has been kidnapped by the KGB and is forced to help them find US Governments secrets from Roswell, New Mexico. This leads to a race against the Soviets to a lost city in South America in search of a mystical Crystal Skull.

Admittedly I went into this movie as a skeptic. I was certain that they wouldn't be able to live up to the original trilogy and this forth attempt would be mediocre at best. So going in my expectations were already very low... I was still disappointed. My complaints are surprisingly enough not about the storyline, nevertheless, the previous films were all about religious artifacts that Jones simply sees as historical finds and is then humbled by their powers. This one is more supernatural...and that's fine, I can deal with that. In fact I thought that it was clever, as the movie is set in the 50's...made sense. What was awful was the dialogue. The on the nose, campy, corny, almost talking to the audience dialogue. You are spoon fed every step of the way. Also I understand that this is not a new character--so people may think character development is not needed...but we haven't seen this character for 20+ years. What happened to the reluctant hero? Suddenly we are watching a movie where there is never once a sense of urgency or real sense of danger. Also as NONE of the endearing sidekicks(Marcus Brody, Sallah, or Professor Henry Jones Sr.) return in this episode, (not even Short Round) how about a little character development on the new guys? Make me care.

I get that people will argue and say that the earlier Jones movies were also a little campy and designed to be "B" action movies. But they took themselves a tad more serious. This one was almost like watching a cartoon. The reunion scenes between Indy and Marion (sorry if that is a spoiler) are so painful to watch--stupid, silly, forced banter that doesn't even come close to the chemistry that they had in Raiders.

I knew going in that it wouldn't live up to the originals, but I had no idea how bad it really was. It's almost as if Spielberg and Lucas were afraid of really trying. I went to the 12:01 AM showing on opening night, I got home around 2:30 and was so distraught that I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark just to make sure I wasn't over reacting........ I wasn't.

** Rentable

Rated PG-13 (I guess Violence? I know I said this before, but for a movie with such a legacy, to have invented the PG-13 rating, I expected a little more sense of urgency, a sense of danger--I mean come on, scare me.)