Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Jones's
Jalopy
(Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, 5/26/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Maybe we should blame it all on Indiana Jones. With many of Hollywood's
best talents now focused in reviving bits of velour-era pop ephemera
like the Hulk and the Fantastic Four, a new addition to the Jones franchise
seems as classic as a lost Homeric epic. But it's an illusion: Indiana
Jones is just the Spider Man of a previous generation, a confection
inspired by the 1930's movie serials beloved of two old dudes named
Lucas and Spielberg. After grossing a billion dollars at the box office,
the crusading archaeologist became the prototype for all the Hellboys
and Dark Knights and other regurgitated heroes yet to come. Ready for
that $150 million Mighty Mouse movie?
So how does the guy in the fedora
stack up in a marketplace dominated by shiny Iron Men and Speed Racers?
In a word, okay—though Harrison Ford is 65, and Indiana Jones
and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the first Jones adventure
released since your Mom was collecting Bangles CDs, it's a fairly painless
way to while away a few hours. Like a trusty old jalopy, it's been sitting
in the garage for years, yet starts up on the first turn of the key.
Just don't expect it to win any races.
By now everyone's probably heard
that the movie has something to do with ancient Incan artifacts and
Area 51. Throw in Cate Blanchett in a wildly anachronistic Louise Brooks
coif, John Milton, and some outtakes from Apocalypto, and you've
got less a story than a big, sticky hock of half-digested cultural associations.
The movie thankfully moves the Jones
saga beyond clobbering Nazis to clobbering the Soviets, who are racing
with Jones to recover a lost quartz skull with Momentous Powers. Indeed,
though the script by David (Spider Man) Koepp is set more than
a decade after WWII, the Cold War frame feels even more retro than the
other films—possibly because the ubiquity of movies with Nazis
makes them seem perennially fresh and every other villain from history
as dead as Charles Dickens. The movie's most frightening scene, where
Jones is stranded in the middle of a mock-up of suburbia during a nuclear
test, is a nightmare right out of the Duck and Cover era.
Not that Koepp and director Steven
Spielberg shy entirely from contemporary concerns. In the most topical
scene in Crystal Skull, Indy gets the '50's equivalent of a Swift
Boating from a couple of FBI interrogators, who try to question his
loyalty by dissing his decorated service in WWII. There may be a political
message intended here, maybe about how certain people cynically advance
their agendas by questioning the loyalty of the real, old-school patriots.
But Spielberg and Koepp are too busy playing with their crystal skulls
to venture more than the amount of scorn for McCarthyism appropriate
for polite company.
Early on, there's an uncomfortable
feeling that Harrison Ford has lost touch with his bread and butter
role: the first lines out of his mouth sound like he's quoting Indy,
not portraying him. With a hero so long in the tooth, the action sequences,
such as when Jones leaps from moving vehicles or brawls with Russians
half his age, risk achieving Shatner-esque absurdity. Still, Ford does
manage to rekindle some of the brio of Indy's heyday. Like many tasks
associated with guys almost as old as John McCain, it just takes a while.
Ford's surprise co-star here (but
not to anybody who saw the preview) is Shia LaBeouf (Transformers).
As Indy's sidekick "Mutt" Williams, LaBeouf is a cross between
a boy scout and Russ Tamblyn in West Side Story. This might sound
like an awkward proposition but LaBeouf pulls it off with some charm.
In fact, Spielberg's introduces the character with an explicit nod to
Marlon Brando's iconic biker get-up in The Wild One, right down
to his cockeyed little cap. This, after his update of the Jimmy Stewart
character in the Rear Window remake Disturbia, makes it
official: when modern Hollywood wants to find someone reminiscent of
the stature of its classic stars, it can think of nobody better than—yes—Shia
LaBeouf.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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