Just got back from a company-sponsored advance screening. Following is a review free of significant spoilers. Also, for the benefit of those who haven’t seen it and just want to know how it is, I’m proposing we keep things spoiler-free (or boxed) for, say, the first page (i.e. 50 posts), but after page one, we can dispense with the spoiler boxes. That way, those who haven’t seen it will know when they can bail out, and those who have seen it won’t need to wonder about continuing to divide their posts into boxed and unboxed sections. Sound good?
Okay. Onward.
My grade: B, but the more I think about it, the more it’s drifting toward a B-minus. It’s fun, and it’s a decent entry in the series, but it’s got some serious flaws. It’ll get flamed as “worst sequel ever” by overcaffeinated netmonkeys, but they’re wrong. It may be a bit of a letdown if you’ve been drooling for it, but treat it as a lark, and you’ll have an adequately entertaining experience.
One major advance fear that does not materialize is a continuation of the decade-long somnambulism of Harrison Ford. He’s still got it as Indy. He has the smirk, and the steely glare, and he handles himself well during the action scenes. Given his recent film work, there was some concern that he’d phone this one in, but be assured, he’s as good here as you want him to be.
Another worrisome element was the introduction of Shia LaBeouf, apparently, from the previews, playing some sort of motorcycle-riding tough-guy teenager. Yes, he’s a trendy up-and-coming star, and yes, the character is extremely goofy. Nevertheless, LaBeouf pretty much pulls it off, at least as far as it’s possible to do so. He gets saddled with a couple of the movie’s lamest moments, but he still manages, ultimately, to emerge as one of its most enjoyable characters. He’s obviously having a great time, and it’s not hard to have fun with him.
Also satisfactory is Cate Blanchett, playing a very strange villain. She’s basically asked to mug for the camera and twirl a nonexistent mustache, not to mention affecting a goofball Natasha Fatale accent; she strikes the balance between cartoon and menace just right. In the end, the character is underwritten (more on this in a moment), but Blanchett isn’t the problem.
Another advance concern was whether Spielberg would still have it in him to execute a big, flashy, essentially simple-minded summer thrill ride. He hasn’t done anything like this since the first Jurassic Park sequel, having been occupied with straight serious movies like Munich in between genre blockbusters tinged heavily with darkness (War of the Worlds). Would he sleepwalk through a movie he doesn’t really care about, or would he re-engage with the material? As it turns out, just like Ford, Spielberg gets right back on this horse. He knows exactly how to stage an action scene, how to develop it, how to escalate the chaos and multiply and weave the separate threads, before tying the scene up into a satisfying climax. His fingerprints are everywhere; this is the old-school Summer Spielberg you remember.
So what’s the problem?
The problem, unfortunately, is that the story just isn’t very good.
More than anything, it feels exactly like a movie that’s been in varying degrees of development for a decade and a half, with story proposals and draft scripts coming and going, with action set pieces retained from previous versions, cut out and reshaped to match against action set pieces lifted from other drafts. It feels like a big ungainly hodgepodge of ideas, jammed together and awkwardly fastened, the rough connections more or less sanded off for comfort.
The worst symptom of this rather graceless construction is the proliferation of characters who don’t actually have enough to do onscreen. I love Ray Winstone, for example, but his character feels like a holdover from past drafts. He’s onscreen for probably half the movie, and afterward, I couldn’t think of a single major contribution to the plot made by his character. Similar things can be said about John Hurt, who has slightly more to do, but is otherwise mostly along for the ride. Even Cate Blanchett’s villain is woefully underdeveloped; when she’s introduced, she talks a lot about her background, and what she represents, and we feel like she’s being set up for some sort of major showdown, or at least a significant revelatory twist. It never happens, and in the end, the character feels like a quirky sidekick to an AWOL lead antagonist.
Especially unfortunate is what happens with the Marion Ravenwood character. It’s great to see Karen Allen back on screen; she’s obviously very rusty, having been entirely out of the business for several years, and her performance is fairly shaky, but her chemistry with Ford is undeniable, and there are a few moments where she generates the tough-cookie luminosity of the first movie. But outside of one action scene in the middle of the story (the jungle truck chase: probably the best set piece in the film), she’s stranded without any reason to be there, a largely passive observer.
This passiveness, in fact, infects the overall story in the last fifteen minutes; our heroes arrive at their destination, and then basically stand around while the plot happens around them. Indy himself essentially waits and watches and waits some more, until it’s clear that things are about to suck, and then spends the next few minutes helping everybody run away. It’s this limp climax that’s dragging the film down from a B to a B-minus in my mind; the big spectacular finale is remarkably unsatisfying.
With reference to the finale, though, and the big reveal of What’s Going On, I will say, in the film’s favor, that it gets the pulpy tone just right throughout. If you’ve heard any rumors at all about the movie, you know that the plot gets kickstarted by a visit to Area 51, and while I won’t tell you what happens or what is found there, you can probably fill in the blanks. And while that seems to be a strange departure after the religious iconography of the first three movies, more science-fiction than mystical, it does pretty much work. Overall, the foundation of the story feels like it’s lifted from the back pages of Amazing Stories circa 1955. It’s not an A story; it’s more like one of the pieces published to fill out the magazine’s length but that still engages the reader due to its weirdness and fever-dream intensity. All the details, from the anti-Communist paranoia to the Atomic-Age set dressings, are spot-on.
It’s really too bad, then, that the narrative is so clunky. Ideas are introduced, and then not carried forward. Characters are brought on board because they serve a necessary purpose for a scene or two, and then hang around for the rest of the movie with their thumbs in their ears. The Indy character is forced to become an exposition machine in scene after scene, explaining as we go along what’s happening and where we need to go next, because the story doesn’t progress organically. And there are a couple of scenes that cross the line from cartoonish to eyerollingly stupid, chief among them LaBeouf and the monkey army. (You’ll know it when it happens, because the audience will start shouting “oh come on” at the screen.)
These are definitely significant flaws, but they don’t entirely derail the movie. Like I said, it’s a B, possibly a B-minus. It’s not the ultimate Indiana Jones adventure, but it isn’t an embarrassment, either; the first one set the bar impossibly high, and the sequels attempt to follow in its footsteps, succeeding in some ways and failing in others. This one is no different. Indeed, it seems to me that the flaws stand out so much precisely because the movie gets so much right. Bottom line, the movie gets the job done, if not with any particular style.
