Spielberg’s fourth Indiana Jones film opens with forty minutes near the old standard, then loses its way in the jungle, handing the stunts to a computer and the plot to a man who talks in riddles. Ford is worth it; the rest is not.
Nineteen years after Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Steven Spielberg has brought the archaeologist back, older, greyer and still wearing the hat. The idea, from a story by George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson and a screenplay by David Koepp, is a good one: move the series out of the 1930s serials it was built on and into the 1950s B-picture, with atom bombs, flying saucers, Soviets and boys on motorbikes. For its first forty minutes the film does exactly that. Then it goes to the jungle, the computer takes over, and 122 minutes later we came out fond of it and not much more.
The opening is the good part. Guy Hendrix Dyas builds a government warehouse of crates stacked to the roof, and Janusz Kamiński lights it with hard shafts of light through dust, so that it looks like the last shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) seen from the other side. Then Jones runs into a town built for an atomic test, with mannequins at the dinner tables and a television on, and hides in a lead-lined fridge. We sat up. Ford standing on a ridge against the mushroom cloud, hat in hand, is the one image in the film we would keep, and when John Williams brought the march in over it we forgave a good deal in advance.
Ford plays the age rather than hiding it. Koepp’s script keeps mentioning that Jones is not the man he was, and Ford agrees with it, moving stiffly, grumbling, and then doing the whip business with the old timing when it counts. Cate Blanchett’s Irina Spalko, a Soviet scientist who claims to read minds, arrives with a rapier, a black bob, a fitted grey uniform from Mary Zophres and an accent from a sillier film, and she is the best of the supporting cast because she alone seems to know exactly what kind of film this is. Shia LaBeouf’s Mutt Williams, all comb and black leather, is better than his reputation; what he is asked to do with vines and monkeys is not his fault. Karen Allen comes back as Marion Ravenwood, and her rowing with Ford across the front seat of a moving vehicle is the warmest thing in the film after the fridge.
The rest of the cast is doing the plot’s job for it. John Hurt’s Professor Oxley spends an hour talking in riddles, and the riddles are what the film has instead of a story; whenever someone needs to know where to go next, Oxley says something about a skull and off they drive. Ray Winstone’s Mac changes sides so often we stopped keeping score. Jim Broadbent has one good scene as the dean who breaks the bad news and is then gone.
The jungle is where the film loses its nerve. The long truck chase through the trees, with Blanchett and LaBeouf fencing across two vehicles, is cut cleanly by Michael Kahn and would be a proper set piece if the frame were not filling up with things that were never there: ants the size of terriers, three waterfalls in a row, a troop of monkeys who swing alongside Mutt as if he were one of them. The monkeys made us groan out loud. By the ants we were no longer worried for anyone, and worry is the whole trade of this series. Kamiński’s hazy, diffused light, so handsome in the warehouse, flattens the jungle into a painted backdrop, and the practical falls and crashes the earlier films were built on are mostly absent.
The second half turns towards the skull and a temple, and we will not describe where it ends up, except to say that Lucas’s story credit shows and that the last ten minutes are softer than the series has ever allowed itself. Most critics have been a little kinder than we are, and we understand why: the film is hard to dislike, the cast is enjoying itself, and the first act is close to the real thing. But Raiders of the Lost Ark frightened us and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) frightened children, and this frightened nobody, which is a strange thing for an adventure film to have settled for.
See it for the warehouse, the fridge and Blanchett, and see it with someone under twelve, who will not mind the monkeys. It runs 122 minutes and carries a 12A, and the certificate is about right: nothing in it will keep anyone up.
