REVIEW: Air Force One

"So, then we come to Air Force One. Explain your thought process behind this poster." "Well, Mr. Lipton, I wanted to communicate the idea that Harrison Ford is in this movie, and that it takes place on a plane..."

Die Hard on Air Force One with President Harrison Ford. There, that’s all you need to know about the movie. You can stop reading now.

Made around the time that Harrison Ford was still a huge star, but more for espionage and law-enforcement thrillers than the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, Air Force One was pretty well-received when it was released, both by critics and the more important opinion of the public’s wallets. Don’t let that fool you. While it’s directed by Wolfgang Peterson of Das Boot and Troy, and features the intriguing premise of the POTUS blowing away Commie punks, this is a movie that manages to take itself quite seriously and wind up hamming it up anyway.

"My fellow Americans... God, I can't stand you people."

The opening credits are pretty rough. Nowadays, when there’s any credits at all at the beginning of a movie, the names tend to be part of an elaborate montage. Not here. We have stirring (i.e. generic) patriotic music while blue text in title case tells us the names of everyone who lifted a finger for the damn movie, with a riveting black background. Hell, the orchestra’s run out of energy by the Visual Effects Supervisor credit! At least there’s two future 24 regulars in the mix (Xander Berkeley and Glenn Morshower), which makes it easier to digitally insert Jack Bauer into the proceedings with my mind. WHO ARE YOU WORKING FOR?!?!?

"Sorry, sir, we can't let you pass. You're not blue like in the photo."

The movie opens with American and Russian special forces parachuting into a Kazhakstani military installation, using silenced rifles to shoot the rooftop guards as they glide in. I’m a little doubtful that anyone could accurately fire a rifle, taking only one shot to kill each target, while parachuting, and that they’d be able to swoop in below gigantic white sails at night without being seen, much less that they’d let their entire mission hinge on that stroke of luck. But as we all know, if looks cool, it works. They succeed in their mission to kidnap the villainous Kazhakstani leader, General Radek, who’s apparently the rare dictator of a troubled country that can’t get either the Russians or the Americans to like him. I presume that the scheme allows the former Kazhak government (presumably headed by the lovely and awesomely-named Nursultan Nazarbayev) to take back power, since it’s a pretty blatant act of war otherwise.

A few weeks later, at a conference in Russia, President Kick-Ass (Harrison Ford) gives a speech announcing that America’s going to get tougher on terrorism. After the speech, his own advisors ream him out for such a brazen announcement, one that complicates their foreign policy agenda and commits them to being more aggressive. So what was the guy supposed to say, that they were going to chill out and smoke some doobies with the terrorists? And since when did announcing a policy actually mean a president had to follow up on it?

"Admiral Gardner, would you care to explain this 'C' in Calculus?"

But it‘s time to head home, so we cut to Air Force One waiting on the tarmac, with the trumpets blaring so loudly that I wonder if it’s flying back to Washington, or to the frikkin’ moon. Boarding the plane are President Kick-Ass, First Lady Grace Marshall (Wendy Crewson), 12-year-old First Daughter Alice (Liesel Matthews), a bunch of cabinet members including National Security Advisor Jack Doherty (Tom Everett) and Major Caldwell (William H. Macy), and innocuously enough, a half-dozen or so Russian journalists led by Ivan Korshunov (Gary Oldman). Spellcheck doesn’t much like that name, so I’ll just call him Ivan. Overall, it’s going to be a pretty relaxed flight back home, because President Kick-Ass is actually pretty mellow. And we know he’s really just a great American, too, because he puts watching a tape-recorded football game over an urgent national security briefing. What a guy! I know I want my president to be just a regular guy, brushing off urgent affairs of state because there’s FUH-BAWL on the tube!

"Oh baby, you make me forget all about Anne Heche."

But after Air Force One takes off, mischief starts brewing. I know that this might be shocking, considering that this is a mid-’90s action movie, but Gary Oldman is actually playing a bad guy! He’s a Kazhak (NOT Borat) and a terrorist, and he and his team are planning to hijack the plane. Now, it might seem unbelievable that the American military would allow foreign journalists, even if they’re secretly well-trained terrorists, to take over the plane. So let’s fall back on that old staple, the traitorous Secret Service agent! It’s Agent Gibbs (Xander Berkeley), who’s betraying his country, assisting terrorists, and putting his life at incredible risk because he’s just kind of dissatisfied with his job. After killing a few fellow agents and helping Ivan and his cronies to a weapons locker (which apparently includes some plastic explosives, as we’ll see in a few minutes; never know when Service Agents might need some of that), he blends back into crowd, apparently gambling that when an official investigation gets underway, nobody’ll make much of the Secret Service agent who suddenly retires with a boatload of cash.

Ivan and the terrorists shoot a lot of people and start taking over the plane, easily mowing down the American agents and officers who outnumber them. During the panic, the non-traitorous Secret Service guys rush President Kick-Ass into his little escape pod and eject him from the plane, or so they think. The pilots try to land the plane at Rammstein Air Force Base in Germany, but Ivan blasts his way into the cabin and takes the controls, sending them back into the air.

"Take him down! He brought a liquid onto the plane!"

Funnily enough, this agitates a lot of people back in Washington, who demonstrate their agitation by talking quickly as they walk off of helicopters and starting a lot of sentences with, “How the hell did…” Among these rather upset people are Vice President Kathryn Bennett (Glenn Close) and Secretary of Defense Walter Dean (Dean Stockwell). They’re contacted by Ivan, who’s flying the plane to Kazhakstan and has control of the hostages. He informs Washington that unless they get the Russians to release General Radek, they’ll start killing a hostage every half-hour. Obviously, this ultimatum would have been more effective if they had the President, but they make lemons out of lemonade. National Security Advisor Doherty gets to play the role of the corporate prick from Die Hard who offers to help negotiate a deal for the bad guys and winds up with a bullet in his head for his troubles.

"I SAID, THIS SENATE SEAT IS ****ING GOLDEN!"

The Secretary of Defense objects to giving into the demand, convinced that Radek is so powerful that if released, he could take control of all of Eastern Europe. Or something. I’m not sure post-Communist Russia’s doing so well if its survival is really jeopardized by the presence of one military strongman in one former USSR republic. But Washington’s got another problem: they discover that the escape pod is empty, and therefore, the President’s still on the plane, opting to solve the terrorist crisis himself rather than get himself to safety. He’s President Kick-Ass after all, and President Kick-Ass’ policy is to support legislation that kicks Russian terrorist ass. It’s a bi-partisan bill in that both the left and right ass-cheeks of each terrorist will be kicked. Meanwhile, he pushes forward an executive order to increase the tax burden on the upper bracket of the terrorists’ skulls, which will in turn have an inflationary effect on their very bloody noses. But due to the harsh economic climate, President Kick-Ass supports a bailout: a bailout of every damn terrorist from 40,000 feet.

Okay. I’m done.

"I've been waiting for the perfect moment..."

President Kick-Ass promptly enacts his agenda, although slowly since there’s only a handful of terrorists he can kill over the course of a two-hour movie. But he does manage to knock them off one at a time, punching one’s lights out and machine-gunning another. He uses his cell phone to call Washington to let them know that he’s alive, if completely irresponsible and impulsive. When a terrorist captures him, he covertly orders for the American jets tailing the plane to fire on Air Force One, so that the turbulence lets the old man once again overpower the considerably younger, stronger, and more armed (fully compared to not at all) villain.

"Wait, say that again. Stupid Verizon keeps breaking up. There's a man with gum to my heft?"

All this time, Ivan thinks that the guy hiding below decks and picking off his men one-by-one is a renegade Secret Service agent (or Jason Voorhees). So he does the only thing you can really expect a guy with hostages to do, which is call out to the guy to surrender or else he’ll execute a hostage. Let’s be fully fair here: when you put a terrorist into a tough position, it’s only reasonable that he use what’s available to him, and it’s the fault of the oppressive American foreign policy that he be placed in such a position. So it’s not really Ivan’s fault that he has to murder the Deputy Press Secretary, who just happens to be an attractive young lady (although not Dana Perino-level attractive). And it’s a very difficult moral decision, just like it was in Die Hard when pretty much the exact same thing happened (although with a slimy corporate kiss-ass, so I guess this counts as originality). The other hostages hear what’s happened, and some guy I only know as Mashed Potato Face decries the choice to let her die instead of giving up, wishing that Washington would just cave in and give the terrorists what they want. It’s subtly implied that this guy’s approach would be the wrong thing to do, or at least that’s the vibe I’m getting.

Al Gore has drawn some criticism for his use of a particularly environmentally-unfriendly private jet.

President Kick-Ass realizes that his guilt at letting the woman die can only be assuaged by kicking ass even harder, so he fiddles with the plane’s wiring so that it starts leaking fuel. As expected, the terrorists demand a mid-air refueling, which the good guys have calculated will force the plane to fly low enough that people could parachute out. So while the terrorists start the refueling, the President sneaks in to free most of the hostages (except the First Lady and First Daughter, whom Ivan’s keeping pretty close) by dropping them off in parachutes out the back of the plane. And let me tell you, it’s hard to have a dopier cinematic moment than a fat hostage smiling like an idiot as she parachutes through the clouds and patriotic music swells. Most of the military personnel stay to help the President rescue the First Family, but things go badly when Ivan realizes that he’s misplaced, you know, 90% of the people on the plane. A combination of events cause the refueling plane to spark and explode, many of the heroic military officers to deplane anyway (sans parachute), and the remaining non-terrorists on the plane (President Kick-Ass, Caldwell, Mashed Potato Face, still-pretending-to-be-a-good-guy Gibbs, First Jacqueline Kennedy Clone, and First Screaming Pre-Teen Girl) to all wind up in terrorist hands.

"Bah! What does Harrison Ford have that I don't?"

Back in Washington, the press has finally gotten wind that something’s up, and Vice President Bennett gives in and announces that Air Force One has been hijacked. This is actually an improvement on what CNN had reported, which was that Air Force One had crashed and everyone had died. I’m not sure the executives at CNN are self-aware enough to realize that even though their network gets plenty of attention in this movie, they're depicted as going live with such unreliable information that they declare the President DEAD. That's probably not something I'd like in my cable news.

What a terrible movie. They couldn't even spell 'cognition' correctly.

Back on the plane, the President being captured allows us to finally have the Kick-Ass/Ivan face-to-face showdown we’d long been waiting for. You see, Ivan is a very excitable fellow. I think that when Gary Oldman, generally a fine actor, was told he was playing a Russian terrorist, he prepared for the part by watching Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons (or, through the miracle of time travel, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), drinking forty cups of coffee, and studying chimpanzees in heat. Suffice to say that he’s somewhat disrespectful toward the President. The new situation convinces the Vice President to give in to the demands and have the Russians prepare to release Radek. Because Russia is such a good friend of the US that they’ll endure an inevitable war with a neighboring country. Quite touching, really.

Gary Oldman's nude performance art drew mixed reactions.

But as we all know, when the bad guys have the good guys tied up and held at gunpoint, someone just needs to loosen his hand restraints and leap at the villains at the right moment to enact an escape. Nope, no clever deception or multi-layered plan here: just cut that tape with a shard of broken glass and start issuing five-fingered vetoes. President Kick-Ass does just that, killing two of the remaining terrorists and getting rescued when the suddenly-heroic Mashed Potato Face throws himself in front of an incoming bullet. In a scene not remotely resembling the end of Die Hard, Ivan stands at the back of the plane, equipping a parachute and threatening to throw the hero’s wife out the back if he doesn’t back down. How the President overcomes this situation is too generic to describe, although the method of killing Ivan is fairly amusing: he strangles him with his own parachute cord and tells him, “Get off my plane!” I would have had him say something like, “Your supermajority‘s all gone, and you just got vetoed!” or “No pardon for you!” but I clearly take this movie even less seriously than the filmmakers did. With the good guys back in control of Air Force One, they no longer need to have the Russians release Radek, which means the Russians get to shoot him dead as he tries to board his helicopter. Maybe they should have done something like that a while ago.

But don’t think this is over! The movie’s only at about the 90-minute mark, and we need more special effects shots to use in the trailers! So as the President flies Air Force One back away from Kazhakstan, Kazhak fighters start shooting at them, clearly authorized to instigate all-out-war against the US despite the lack of any remaining possible gain. A squadron of US fighters takes them out, and one brave pilot even sacrifices himself by flying in front of a missile, kind of like the scene three minutes ago where the Mashed Potato Face jumped in front of the bullet. They cut out the scene that further escalated this theme, where Delaware saved the President by leaping in front of an ICBM for him. In any event, the shootout leaves Air Force One very damaged, out of parachutes, and unable to reach a friendly air base before it’ll run out of fuel.

"I told you to press the red, blue, and yellow buttons! You pressed the red, blue, and green buttons! Now let me see you do it right!"

So they rig a solution whereby, during the last few minutes before they run out of fuel, a military plane connects to Air Force One via a giant zip line, and marines will be zipped down onto Air Force One, and then the remaining people will be zipped back out the other way. People get evacuated one-by-one this way, including Mashed Potato Face, who apparently gets to both be heroic and survive the movie. President Kick-Ass, being a good guy in charge of a military that takes his safety as more of a recommendation than an imperative, is among the last to go. However, Air Force One is sinking too fast, so Caldwell, a marine, Gibbs, and the President are left aboard with only time to get one more zipped back to the safety of the other plane. So Gibbs finally reveals his true colors and shoots the marine and Caldwell; they just had to kill off the most likable supporting character at the last minute. Once again, there’s a generic struggle that Gibbs loses, and the President zips his way off the plane before it goes down, crashing into the ocean with computer-generated special effects that rival those when you get shot down in Star Fox. The President’s safe, so the music’s triumphant, people in Washington are cheering, and the fact that dozens of Americans have died--perhaps more than if the President had ejected from the plane and they’d shot it down in the first place--is swept under the rug.

"Mr. President, no, I don't think hiding in an asteroid field is practical."

On its face, Air Force One doesn’t seem so bad. It’s a generic summer action blockbuster with the nifty premise of Harrison Ford as a president who beats up terrorists himself. And it’s not THAT much worse than what you’d expect from that description, except that it’s got an unusually high number of lazy plot contrivances, its mid-air special effects have aged poorly, its musical score is so generic that it’s really quite breathtaking (Wikipedia notes that Jerry Goldsmith was hired to write it at the last second, so I guess he‘s not to blame), and the movie kills off so many good guys so periodically that it’s oddly depressing, even when it’s supposed to be uplifting. The parts where President Kick-Ass and my mentally-inserted Jack Bauer teamed up to torture terrorists were among the few highlights.

"Control, this is Sullenberger. Didn't go quite as well this time. Over."

So it’s not a particularly notable movie, and I don’t have anything against any of the people involved; most of the actors are capable of being very good, and do all right here, and most of the prominent crew (except screenwriter Andrew Marlowe, who might have peaked with either this or Hollow Man) have all worked on movies I’ve liked. It’s just a perfectly normal bad movie, offending none of my sensibilities except that I prefer to see things that are good.

So, um, that’s it. It’s a bad movie. That’s my conclusion. Yep.

REVIEW: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Let's see you make a slick marketing acronym out of THAT title, promotions department!

You can’t accuse me of not wanting to like this one. Yes, when I heard that they had finally gotten started on Indiana Jones 4, I wondered if they could still find any ancient artifacts that actually predated Harrison Ford. But cranky old Gramps Jones actually sounded like fun the more I thought of it, and it’s not like Indy was ever not grumpy to begin with. Yes, I wondered why the heck they could have let George Lucas reject a script by Frank Darabont; it was like hearing that Dennis Kucinich had given Bill Clinton some political pointers. But then I saw The Mist, and all of a sudden, I was willing to give George the benefit of the doubt that they were going to cobble together a better script. By the time I sat down in the theater, I was aware that the movie had scored fairly well with the critics and public, and I was thrilled to be sitting down to watch the first new Indiana Jones adventure since Last Crusade, released when I was just a kid. And I was also pulling for this movie to be a smashing success that would finally prove that as good as Star Wars had once been, Indiana Jones was, and always had been, the great adventure series of the last half of the 20th century.

These days, this is Harrison Ford's "good angle."

And that fact is still true. Although Spielberg and company did not help my case. Spielberg’s an odd director to me. He’s been building up his resume as a great “serious movie” director ever since Schindler’s List. But he sometimes either just miscalculates a movie as badly as someone miscalculates the $100 question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? or he directs an entire movie he clearly didn’t care about for one second. His popcorn movies, once the only thing he was known for, have been very erratic in particular. The Lost World: Jurassic Park couldn’t have been less original if it had actually been a George Lucas-esque re-release of Jurassic Park with some scientists riding on Hadrosaur backs digitally inserted into the background. AI: Artificial Intelligence was the result of someone deciding that fusing Pinocchio with Blade Runner with Eyes Wide Shut was a good idea. And now, we have Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And the movie starts up on an ominous note from the very first shot: that of a CGI prairie dog (no kidding) that’s only slightly less realistic-looking than the groundhog from Caddyshack. And you’ll get to see the prairie dogs several more times for goofy little reaction shots, as if George Lucas had decided that fake-looking desert vermin are the new Ewoks. Damn you, Lucas!

Way to suck in that gut, Indy.

Let’s get it out of the way: Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford, if you’re an ignoramus who needs to be told) is old, and the movie acknowledges it, although boy, does Spielberg avoid close-ups. The 1940s have completely passed by since Last Crusade, which means that rock and roll’s in fashion, Eisenhower’s in office, and the Nazis are now in Argentina (and not in this movie, disappointingly, despite the fact that the movie mostly takes place in South America). Instead, the Russians are the new bad guys, and to its credit, the movie doesn’t bother empathizing with them or giving them moral equivalence with the Americans, aside from some mandatory bashing of the McCarthy-era FBI. But after the movie gets that out of its system, it’s the ‘50s and they’re Commie bastards, so let’s get to business. A group of Soviet soldiers starts out the movie by taking control of Area 51 in the middle of the Nevada desert. I’m not sure why Area 51 is a lone warehouse populated by five guards and no scientists, but okay. They’re led by Col. Irina Spalko, played by Cate Blanchett, who is making her third appearance on Satan’s Jockstrap. I sometimes wonder why human beings are so cruel to each other because of petty politics, even to the point of vandalism and murder; I often wonder why Cate Blanchett is on three movies on my site. Although she’s going to be wearing the Golden Sombrero if she picks up too many more roles like this one. Playing a devious Russian scientist/military leader, Cate has the voice of Natascha from Rocky and Bullwinkle, the haircut of a Bulgarian gymnast, and the subway station-blue jumpsuit of a Satellite of Love inhabitant. To be fair, she’s not a bad villain for a non-serious film like this, and it’s not like the traitorous Frenchmen and power-hungry Nazis in past films have been subtle or original creations. I guess I just wouldn’t have expected that they’d need an actress like Cate Blanchett to deliver lines like, “Dohnt toy vith meee, Doktohr Johnez!”

Steven Spielberg once brought dinosaurs to life. Now he's going to do the same for prairie dogs. In theaters, this summer.

The Russians pull Indy out of a trunk, along with his pudgy, British cockney-accented sidekick Mac (Ray Winstone, not looking so much like Beowulf anymore). Spalko takes Indy and Mac (Indy Mac? Oh God.) to the warehouse full of boxes--Look a bit familiar?--and demands that Indy help them find whatever landed in Roswell in 1947. Hmmm, the movies have gone from Judaism (Raiders) to Hinduism (Temple of Doom) to Christianity (Last Crusade), and now… Scientology?!?! Yes, aliens are going to be behind all the wacky ancient stuff in this movie. Indy finds the alien pod thingy by tossing gunpowder into the air and following it as it gravitates toward a powerful magnetic force--so powerful that you kind of wonder who manufactures all the plastic nails they must have used to fasten all the other boxes in the warehouse. Inside the Roswell box is a well-preserved dead alien, because apparently the Army’s completely done with experimenting on it, and just decided on the Army equivalent of stuffing it in the crawlspace behind a stack of National Geographics. The Ruskies are about to steal the alien, but Indy of course manages to overpower one of them during the five-second timeframe between when a bad guy recognizes a threat and when his reflexes kick in and he fires the gun he has held at the ready. He threatens Spalko with a machine gun, but it turns out that Mac is a double-agent. Gee, a traitor in an Indiana Jones movie? At least they gave us a whole four minutes with which to get to know him before the devastating betrayal. Apparently, having one more machine gun-wielding villain directly in front of him suddenly makes Indy’s Mexican stand-off futile, so he flees instead, racing past bullets that somehow miss the slow-moving old guy who barely avoids throwing his back out. He climbs up boxes and swings across rafters with his whip, which the Russians apparently didn’t consider a weapon they should confiscate when they took him prisoner. In the chaos, they smash open the box containing the Ark of the Covenant from the first movie, one of several references to past entries in the series.

"Damn you, Short Round!"

After escaping, Indy wanders through the desert to a lone town. Upon arriving, he discovers that all its inhabitants are mannequins. Either he’s in one of about eighty Twilight Zone episodes, or he’s stumbled upon a fake town built to be destroyed in an A-bomb test. Which is of course going to happen exactly one minute from now. So how does Indy survive? By hiding in a refrigerator. Ah, but it’s a refrigerator with lead lining, as the movie makes sure to give us time to notice, so that makes sense. He then takes extra precaution by activating his Go-Go Gadget Nuclear Fallout Repellant and dousing himself in unicorn pee. And that lead not only shields Indy from the force of a nuclear blast, but it cushions him so that he doesn’t break every bone in his body while bouncing around in a refrigerator that’s flung several miles away. Or suffer radiation sickness. Or melt from the heat. And that door sure managed to stay shut nicely, even without any kind of locking mechanism. Although I’ll give this much to the movie: IJATKOTCS’s man-inside-fridge-survives-nuclear-explosion is more realistic than even the dialogue scenes of the average Heroes episode.

Mooning: you're doing it wrong.

Having escaped, Indy is accused by the FBI of being a Communist agent since, after all, he was good friends with Mac, who was a traitor. And the FBI is very evil for accusing a man as trusted as Indiana Jones of possibly being a Communist agent. For what possible reason? Because the man Indiana Jones most trusted turned out to be a Communist agent? Puh-shaw. Indy promptly gets canned from his teaching position (You’d think that his frequent unannounced mid-semester excursions to fight Nazis would have done that a long time ago.) just in time to start a new adventure. He’s approached by Mutt (Shia LaBeouf), who’s a leather jacket-wearing, motorcycle-riding, fancy prep school-dropping-out-of rebel with street smarts and a free spirit. I’m not sure if he was written as a movie character or a Pepsi mascot, but either way, he couldn’t have been more out of place in an Indiana Jones movie if he had brought Alf along as a wacky sidekick. He tells Indy that he needs his help finding his mother and his surrogate uncle, Harold Oxley, who was a friend of Indy’s and a fellow mad archaeologist. Oxley disappeared while searching for Akator, a lost city along the Amazon. According to myth, which means according to absolute irrefutable fact, whoever finds an artifact called the Crystal Skull and returns it to Akator will gain ungodly amounts of wealth and power. Which means that this movie has the exact same premise as Raiders and Last Crusade, except with Russians and aliens instead of Nazis and God. Cool! I can make Indiana Jones movies too! If they keep advancing the chronology a decade each time, the movies will just write themselves!

"Is it an ancient artifact containing power we cannot even comprehend, Indy?" "No, kid. I think it's the $150 Special Limited Edition Blu-Ray disc packaging they're going to sell this movie in within a couple of months."

1960s
Villains: Vietcong
Source of Mystic Power: The Beatles

1970s
Villains: Richard Nixon’s thugs
Source of Mystic Power: Reggie Jackson

1980s
Villains: The Golden Girls
Source of Mystic Power: Apple stock

1990s
Villains: Teenagers who turn murderous after playing Mortal Kombat
Source of Mystic Power: Lycos

2000s
Villains: Oh, I think you know who
Source of Mystic Power: Fuel-efficient cars and public transportation

Anyway, they escape both the FBI and Russian agents and head to Peru. After the mandatory mission through a dark and cobweb-ridden tomb (Let’s see, we’ve done tarantulas, snakes, cockroaches, and rats, so…. scorpions are next on the agenda!), Indy and Mutt wind up with the Crystal Skull, but are immediately taken prisoner again by the Russians. Spalko reveals that they have Oxley (John Hurt; gee, do you think this character might have been Sean Connery again if they could have signed him?) prisoner, and that he knows where Akator is, but he’s a babbling loon after spending too much time with the Crystal Skull earlier on, and they need Indy to help translate his cryptic mutterings. They believe that the Crystal Skull and whatever lies at Akator will give them great psychic powers, which will allow them to control the world. Well, at least they have a more concrete idea of what their magical artifact would give them than the Nazis did with the Ark of the Covenant; you have to give them credit for having a goal.

"I've got to know one thing, Mom. And I need you to tell me the truth. Are my eyes really going to look like that when I'm your age?"

Indy initially refuses to help, even when the Russians threaten to kill Mutt. But he has to rethink it when the aliens bring out… a green-skinned, bug-eyed alien! Holy crap! Wait a minute… is that… oh dear Lord. I’m sorry, it’s Marion (Karen Allen), Indy’s love interest from Raiders. I really don’t mean to make juvenile insults about people’s looks on this website; I’m far more into insults that really strike at the inner lack of qualities people have, insults that can’t be easily forgiven. But when I look at Karen Allen, dredged up from semi-retirement for this movie, I can kind of realize why she hasn’t been in many movies lately. There haven’t been too many movies about fortune teller ladies who live in Louisiana bayous. So I guess the sex appeal for this movie has to be carried by Cate Blanchett made up like a matryoshka doll and Karen Allen made up to look like that Nazi after he chose the wrong Holy Grail. With Ford and Allen as the leads and source of the film’s only romance, I can imagine Spielberg screaming at his director of photography, “More Vaseline on the camera lens, dammit! And zoom out! Out, out, out! Hey, is there any way we can add rain to this scene? Or a massive solar flare? If this image looks any sharper than the Zapruder film, we’re doomed! IMAX will be my undoing! Any chance we can just slap a wig on LaBeouf and make him the love interest instead?"

Children of the Cranberries

Oh, and by the way, Mutt is actually Indy’s son. Just in case you hadn’t figured that out halfway into scanning the movie poster.

My Mother, the Car

As the Russians haul them down the Amazon in search of Akator, in trucks rather than boats for some reason, Indy and Marion bicker about their failed relationship constantly. When they get tired of bickering, they get back to the perfunctory task of escaping. They take control of a truck, and despite the fact that the bazooka round Indy fires near the start of the scene appears to be the only weapon they have, the machine gun-armed Russians appear to be deathly afraid of Indy/Marion/Oxley/Mutt killing them all. Thus begins a chase through the jungle in which Spielberg appears to have measured the audience’s excitement by the sheer number of times that people jump from one car to another while they’re still in motion, and how many times the damn Crystal Skull gets tossed back and forth between the two sides. Apparently realizing that the scene goes from tongue-in-cheek to drooling-down-the-chin stupid very early on, Spielberg hams it up. He has Mutt sword-fight Spalko while straddling the good guys’ and bad guys’ cars, plants smacking him in the crotch along the way--couldn’t the Russian driver have killed him by just slightly slowing down or veering to the right for a moment? But that’s not enough, so Spielberg has Mutt swing through the vines like Tarzan, befriend an army of monkeys, and swing onto Spalko’s car to recapture the Crystal Skull--if that sounds like a joke, you weren’t one of the 5 trillion people who saw this movie in the theater. But the action scene isn’t long enough yet, so let’s just throw in a swarm of killer flesh-eating ants. I don’t know if I want to live in a world in which an Indiana Jones movie rips off The Mummy, in this case the swarms of killer flesh-eating scarabs. And to top it off, let’s have Marion confidently drive her car off a 100-foot cliff, knowing that she’ll be caught gently by a tree and eased down so that she can drive off to ford the river below. It’s a feat of timing and coordination that people in The Matrix would find it audacious, but it’s a breeze to Granny Marion! And to top off the topping off, Indy and his happy family manage to easily survive driving off a massive waterfall three consecutive times. I’m sure that the scene cost about 1,000 times as much to make as the truck chase scene from Raiders, so you should all be appreciative to all the hard-working graphics designers who created the cartoon world that Indiana Jones now lives in.

"Hey, Hurt. LaBeouf's getting on my case for looking so old. Tell me, what's your secret?"

Having escaped the Russians, Indy and his gang (which now once again includes Mac, who’s assured them that he’s actually a double agent working for the CIA) continues on into Akator, solving various Myst-like puzzles and solving every other problem by having Oxley wave the Crystal Skull at it to make it go away. Of course, Mac is actually still working for the Russians, and Indy fell for it yet again. Remember, if you’re a traitor in an action movie, yelling, “I’m a double agent!” in the middle of an action scene doesn’t give the good guy enough time to ponder the likelihood of this statement, and after the action scene ends, it would be awkward for him to now kill you, so you pretty much win by default. Mac leads Russians into the pyramid of Akator, and despite Indy and company no longer being of use, the Russians are sporting enough to not kill them yet.

Archaeologists have long sought out the great ancient Aztec Applebees of Central America.

Remember the end of Raiders where the bad guys got exactly what they wanted, completing the ceremony and tapping the awesome power of the artifact they had strived for, but it turned out that the ceremony unleashed power beyond their reckoning and it annihilated them in a special effects-filled sequence while Indy and Marion survived simply by not participating in that ceremony? And the similar ending to Last Crusade? Yeah, it’s exactly like that. The pyramid explodes after Spalko reaffixes the Crystal Skull to an alien’s Crystal Skeleton, resurrecting the alien (So how did the damn thing die in the first place?), and the good guys run away while Mac, Spalko, and the Russians get sucked into another dimension, along with the flying saucer buried underneath the pyramid. The whole scene looks very expensive, although none of it really involves Indy or Marion or their friends, who basically just jog away while things explode all around them. I guess that the great stuntwork Harrison Ford and Karen Allen were originally asked to do would have violated the terms of their AARP life insurance.

This is what you get when you don't change your oil every 3,000 miles.

The final scene has Indy and Marion getting married in a whiter-than-white church, with Mutt and a newly-sane Oxley in attendance. I wonder how Shia LaBeouf, rising young force in Hollywood, felt about getting completely ignored in the second half of this movie in favor of that chick from Raiders and Animal House and no other movies that human beings have ever seen. But just to remind the public that we haven’t forgotten about Mutt, the lone human being under the age of 45 in this whole movie, an unearthly gust of wind rushes into the church and blows Indy’s famous fedora to him. As he picks up the hat, we’re wondering if this is Spielberg’s promise that Mutt will be replacing Indy in future adventures, like Mutt Jones and the Samurai Sword of Great Justice and Mutt Jones and the Voodoo That You Do. I think I'd rather see Margaret Mead and the Mystery of Adolescence. Fortunately, Indy swipes the hat back on his way out of the church, barely resisting the urge to punch the skinny kid square in the nose and tell him that even by the time the next movie rolls around, Harrison Ford at age 126 will be the only Indiana Jones worth having in a movie.

IJATKOTCS is about what you’d expect when you take a mythic and beloved movie character and suddenly revitalize him a decade and a half after his previous movie. The movie exists purely to make money, not tie up any loose ends (Rocky Balboa), explore new angles for the character (Rambo 4), or even give some new director a chance to mess with the existing conventions (Live Free or Die Hard). Indiana Jones 4 just rehashes the same formula from the first several movies, with the Russians/aliens/South America storyline masquerading as originality. Whereas each Indiana Jones movie prior to this had a bit of a different tone to it, this time around the formula and spirit is exactly identical to Last Crusade. I’ll grant that the movie’s not all that terrible until the Tarzan sequence begins its death spiral; I even thought that the nuclear bomb sequence was amusing in a Roger Moore-as-James Bond sort of way. But even a series built on credibility-straining stunts needs some vague connection to reality, or else we’re not going to laugh or be impressed when Indy actually does pull off some outrageous stunt. At a time when the James Bond movies are going back to semi-plausibility, Indiana Jones is going Octopussy on us.

Worried that Heather Ledger was going to upstage his famous role, Jack Nicholson made an uncredited cameo as the Joker in a competing summer film.

But this is supposed to be Indiana Jones. And there’s a whole generation of kids who think The Mummy's Rick O’Connell’s the greatest action movie archaeologist of all time. And if this is the only Indiana Jones movie those kids have seen, I might not be able to blame them.