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Cracking the whip

Back in action, Indiana Jones hasn't lost a step
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May 28th, 2008 issue

By Rachel Shimp

For the Post
COURTESY PHOTO
A teacher and a greaser explore the caves and burial grounds of Peru.
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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull


Directed by Steven Spielberg
With Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf, Karen Allen, John Hurt, and Ray Winstone

He may be an old man, but Indy’s still got it. The fedora and the bullwhip, anyway, if not the boundless energy of his younger self.
There’s something funny about bringing back Harrison Ford as archaeologist and explorer Dr. Henry Walton Jones, Jr. for one more adventure, and his character acknowledges it right away. That self-awareness makes the movie’s premise amusing when it could easily have come off as tired. “This is not as easy as it used to be,” he tells his longtime sidekick Mac (Ray Winstone), as they find themselves on the receiving end of some Cold War iciness in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
The action begins in a military warehouse in 1957 Nevada. A jalopy full of kids listening to Elvis has raced a military vehicle there, which contains the kidnapped Jones. He’s privy to information the Russians want — and the aforementioned iciness would be that emanating from the steely eyes of Skull’s villainess, operative Irina Spalko. Cate Blanchett plays her as a sword-brandishing dominatrix with a severe black bob, and a hilarious accent that occasionally dips into Blanchett’s native Australian.
In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy fought Nazis who were on the hunt for the Ark of the Covenant; in The Last Crusade, the bad guys were after the Holy Grail. Here, Spalko’s crew is searching for artifacts for “paranormal military application,” but her Jedi mind tricks don’t work on Jones. His escape from her entourage is the first of many classic Lucas-Spielberg action set-ups in Skull. The cavernous warehouse offers plenty of opportunities for Indy to swing from light fixtures and for the Russians to swing giant chains at his head.
Undaunted, our hero eventually arrives back at his college, where “Better Dead Than Red” banners decorate the campus. Forced out due to his ambiguous position in the political climate, he’s on the way to Europe when life takes about 20 unexpected turns.
First and foremost, a teenager calling himself Mutt (Shia LaBeouf) shows up on a motorcycle, carrying a letter he needs Indy to decode. Their scene at a café, where Mutt’s insolence is shown by his interaction with the other patrons as he talks to Indy, is a brilliant moment. It fleshes out his character while showing that Spielberg’s movies are made to be visually explored. With producer George Lucas — and Industrial Light and Magic, which makes everything go boom — he’s a powerhouse. Look in one place for too long and you’ll miss the sparkling spider webs in the corner, and the eyes that might be hiding behind them.       
Jones and Mutt don’t stay long in the city. The letter leads them to the Peruvian gravesite of a conquistador who was rumored to have found a crystal skull. Psychics believe the pre-Columbian artifact has special powers, a claim scoffed at by the mainstream scientific community. But it’s enough to attract the Russians, a mutinous friend and Indy’s old flame. The fight for the artifact tears through the jungles, as Spalko’s men manage to find Indy’s crew again and again, even after they tumble down three waterfalls. Spalko’s sword-fight with Mutt, as both stand on top of jeeps blasting through the foliage, is wonderfully absurd.  
Like the aging Ford, Skull suffers a little from softness in the middle. Location changes come faster than the tossed-off details of this or that legend, and it’s easy for the mind to drift. But the out-of-this-world subtext of Skull saves all the terrestrial action from being deadly dull. The crystal skulls themselves hardly look magical; more like plastic filled with cellophane. But what they represent is a novel idea for a movie like this. At least one fate in Skull ends on a sci-fi note cribbed from Stephen King’s short story The Jump.
Exept for a faint trickle from a bullet hole here or a punched nose there, the bloodless killings of commies and evil natives are reminiscent of the 20th-anniversary special edition of E.T. More sensitive about gun violence, Spielberg digitally replaced the guns of federal agents in one scene with walkie-talkies, a move some thought silly. But those who grew up with the director know that he trades in campy, family-friendly violence. (If there were ever a greater oxymoron, I don’t know it).
The Indy franchise is modeled after the pulp magazine heroes that Lucas and Spielberg loved as kids. Built on a strong archetypal vision, each film deserves its lasting pop culture appeal.  
Rachel Shimp can be reached at rshimp@praguepost.com


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