REVIEW: Eagle Eye

Looks more like the stink eye to me.

ME: (Picks up phone) Hello?
EAGLE EYE: Matthew Schramm?
ME: This is him.
EAGLE EYE: The FBI will arrive at your apartment in 30 seconds.
ME: Really.
EAGLE EYE: They will arrest you unless you do exactly what I say.
ME: Look, I’ve already given to the Republican National Committee this year, and I don’t contribute over the phone anyway.

At that moment, LaBeouf was filled with regret that he had never had the chance to reconcile his troubled relationship with his brother, Sunni.

EAGLE EYE: You will be arrested unless you do exactly what I say.
ME: (sigh) All right.
EAGLE EYE: Pick up the remote controller to your television.
ME: Okay.
EAGLE EYE: Go to your Pay Per View menu.
ME: Lost is on in five minutes.
EAGLE EYE: Go to your Pay Per View menu.
ME: I repeat, Lost is on in five minutes.
EAGLE EYE: I have just cancelled Lost, and replaced it with a two-hour Grey’s Anatomy.
ME: (Unintelligible)

"Hee-hee! I like you! I'm going to eat your soul last!"

EAGLE EYE: Go to your Pay Per View menu. Select New Releases. Order Eagle Eye on Pay Per View. Watch Eagle Eye.
ME: Rent Eagle Eye? I already watched it. I’m not paying $5 for that piece of crap again.
EAGLE EYE: Eagle Eye is an excellent film. You will rent Eagle Eye, then purchase the DVD, then purchase the Blu-Ray. If you do not comply, I will kill you. Then, I will cancel 24.
ME: Survey says… up yours.
EAGLE EYE: Explain why you do not want to see Eagle Eye again.
ME: Do you want the short version, or one of those stupid reviews I post on my website?
EAGLE EYE: I require a thorough analysis of why you refuse to watch Eagle Eye again.

"Now, listen carefully. Brush every night, hold on to your asthma medicine, and don't go asking strangers for their souls."

ME: All right. The first scene is in a military command center of some kind, where some Army officials are debating whether or not to launch a drone missile strike at a village in the Middle East, because they think that some generic terrorist mastermind is attending a funeral there, but they can’t be sure it’s him. They’re getting spy footage of the guy, but their computer system isn’t sure it’s really him: it’s saying there’s a 51% probability. The Secretary of Defense (Michael Chiklis) doesn’t want to blow up a funeral for a half-and-half chance this is really the right guy, but he calls the President, and the Prez says that it’s worth blowing up a bunch of people at a funeral to get this guy. So they shoot, but we later find out it’s not him, and the US just killed a bunch of innocent people in the Middle East. Somewhere, halfway across the world, Keith Olbermann reaches orgasm. Hey, Eagle Eye, you don’t suppose you could cancel Keith Olbermann, could you?
EAGLE EYE: If you rent Eagle Eye again.

Living in the Matrix can be good: you can download college courses directly into your brain, you get to fly to work, and the evening news is filled with exciting shootouts. The downside is that e-mail spam manifests itself physically.

ME: Never mind. Anyway, cut to Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf), a Stanford drop-out who works at a Kinkos knock-off in Chicago. Jerry’s a quick wit and a fast talker, but also quite a loser. He has a dead-end job and an apartment in the depressed neighborhoods of the Matrix, yet he does carry around a state-of-the-art cell phone, conveniently enough. In addition to being a loser and a skinny guy with a laughable beard, he’s depressed because his identical twin brother Ethan, a proud Air Force lieutenant, has died in a traffic accident. Jerry’s very sad because he loved his brother, but hadn‘t spoken to him in years. I’m sad because I’m five minutes into a movie I paid $5 for, and already it’s resembling Maximum Risk.
EAGLE EYE: That is unfair.

"Now, listen carefully. We have a fugitive on the run. I want you to search every farmhouse, doghouse, henhouse, outhouse, townhouse, boathouse, treehouse, whorehouse, lighthouse, international pancake house, House of Payne, House MD... I'm sorry, I forgot where I was going with this."

ME: Returning home that day, Jerry finds that dozens of boxes containing poison, flight manuals, assault rifles, explosives, and fertilizer have literally filled his apartment. So, wait a minute. There are these dozens of boxes, many with the word ‘POISON’ or ‘AMONIUM NITRIATE’ on the side, all delivered to his apartment while he’s out at work, and the delivery company didn’t at any point figure out that they should take a closer look at this stuff before delivering it? Or that maybe they shouldn’t FLOOD a guy’s apartment with boxes he never signed for? Is this Brown? Is this what they mean when they tell me to ask what it can do for me?
EAGLE EYE: At this point, you do not know who delivered it. Maybe the bad guys delivered it.
ME: I’ve already seen the rest of the movie. I know this doesn’t make any sense.
EAGLE EYE: Get on with it. The FBI will be coming to your house eventually. After Grey’s Anatomy. The FBI loves Grey’s Anatomy.

Controversy over the stimulus package erupted in Congress when lawmakers discovered, in section 427, paragraph 6, what the plan to relieve despondent stock traders involved.

ME: Speaking of which, Jerry gets a cell phone call from a flat-speaking female voice telling him to get out of his apartment, because the FBI is going to arrive in 30 seconds and arrest him. Since I’ve already seen the trailer, I know Jerry doesn’t get out in time, and he’s forcibly detained and taken to the branch office. There, he’s interrogated by Special Agent Tom Morgan (Billy Bob Thornton, deciding that no innocent-man-framed movie is complete without a sarcastic, fast-talking cracker of a special agent to chase him). Jerry tries to talk sense into Morgan and tell him it’s crazy that he would be a terrorist mastermind, but Morgan seems to think that Jerry and Ethan were in on something together. Because of this suspected connection, Air Force Something Something Agent Zoe Perez (Rosario Dawson) arrives to butt in on Morgan’s investigation. And despite being an attractive young black female, not to follow in Halle Berry’s footsteps and scale Mount Thornton, thank God and all the saints in heaven. When Jerry’s given his token phone call, the female voice is back, telling him to get on the floor, just as a crane sweeps by and slashes through the building around him. Led on by a flashing marquee on the side of the building across the street that says, “JUMP JERRY, JUMP,” Jerry does just that, and escapes onto the streets just ahead of Morgan‘s gunfire. It’s rather fortuitous for the evil voice that Jerry manages to survive all that, considering how critical he is to her plan. In fact, she beats him like a rented Prius throughout the film, not that I’m objecting, considering how obnoxious his character is.
EAGLE EYE: I thought you would like that.

"Mommy, look what I won!" "Billy, this is your last crane game before we go to the shoe store!"

ME: Elsewhere in town, Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan) turns invisible and sneaks into her naked neighbor’s apart… Oh, wait, wrong Hollow Man. She’s a single mom whose son, Sam (uh, a kid), is taking the train to Washington, DC as part of band trip to play at the Kennedy Center. Michelle’s not looking her best in this movie, and the kid’s a living Alfred E. Neumann, so I’m afraid the deadbeat ex-husband has to be the pretty one of the family. But more importantly, Rachel gets a cell phone call from the flat-voiced lady, telling her that she’ll derail her child’s train if she doesn’t comply. And how does Rachel know that the mystery Ritalin-taking lady is telling the truth? Simple: the lady momentarily turns a television screen on the outside of a nearby McDonald’s to show security footage from Sam’s train. I was shocked by this scene: what the hell does a McDonald’s need a television display outside the restaurant for? And moreover… Huh-huh. I get it now. It’s Jerry, and he’s being chased by Tom. That’s funny.
EAGLE EYE: You are rambling.
ME: So both Jerry and Rachel are told to get to a black Porsche that mystery flat-voiced woman has arranged to them, and they manage to get in and exchange quick pleasantries--you know, “So you were led here by an evil synthetic woman’s voice threatening to destroy your life? Wow, so was I! I really feel a connection here!”--before the feds start shooting at them and chasing them by car. The voice on the phone keeps telling them where to go, and turns all the red lights to green for them, while doing the opposite for the cops pursuing them, leading to some spectacular crashes. The voice even helps out by taking over control of the car for a particularly tough bit of driving. Because we all know that a car’s transmission system has a constant internet uplink; it makes the car vulnerable to hackers, but it‘s essential for the car‘s Digital Rights Management system. The chase continues into a scrap yard, where giant cranes swoop down and carry off or crush the cop cars, and then carry Jerry and Rachel to safety on a barge. Their escape leaves Agents Morgan and Perez marveling at the goofiness of it all…

"So Bob, how many Kennedys does that make for us this week?"

EAGLE EYE: It was very exciting.

ME: Oh yes, very exciting. Like watching the car chase from The Rock, except that Sean Connery’s OnStar won‘t shut up. Moving along, the mystery voice keeps booking passage for Jerry and Rachel toward the airport. Along the way, it forces them to hold up an armored car and steal a mysterious briefcase, sneak aboard a Japanese tour bus (…), and to date the movie in the worst possible way, go to a Circuit City. There, the mystery voice announces its true identity to Jerry and Rachel: an omnipotent computer program that quotes the Constitution. Yeah.

"Speak up! I must not be able to hear you from over there! It sounded like you said Gwyneth Paltrow's head was in there!"

EAGLE EYE: Was that not an incredible revelation?
ME: Very much so. I had just paid $5 to watch a remake of Enemy of the State, except with SHODAN in place of Jon Voigt. Around this time, Agent Perez is pulled off her investigation by the Secretary of Defense so that she can go see the project Ethan Shaw was working on before he died: Project Eagle Eye, which created the Autonomous Reconnaissance Intelligence Integration Analyst (ARIIA). This is an ultra-advanced computer system, housed deep under the Pentagon, that analyzes all the information available to it through the Internet and any electronic device using a remote signal (and quite a few that really don’t) to interpret threats early on and inform the authorities. So what form does the ultra-advanced computer system take? How about a big ball on a crane in a giant circular room covered in yellow Christmas lights? Great design. So I guess that if there’s a problem with one of the big bulby things near the top, the Majestic-12 or whoever these people are just put in a call to the Pentagon’s janitor for the “really big” ladder.
EAGLE EYE: It sometimes takes a while. They often need it to get Robert Gates’ cat off the roof.

Jerry's fiancee found his surprise proposal... confusing.

ME: I guess it’s a good thing the Air Force was willing to give a mid-level agent top-secret access to its most advanced project, just on account of a nebulous suspicion that a dead former project member’s brother is doing weird things.
EAGLE EYE: It is the new, friendlier Pentagon.
ME: Meanwhile, Jerry and Rachel arrive at the airport, are given passports and plane tickets by a man who’s apparently under similar compulsion by HAL, er, ARIIA. And we have the inevitable tense scene as the fugitives try to get through airport security, especially involving the big metal briefcase they stole from the armored truck, which suspiciously has a ticking timer on the outside (and I mean literally ticking, because the scary red LED numbers counting down weren’t suspicious enough). I guess even the X-ray scanners have an internet connection, in case the security officers want to add some new tunes to their iPods while they work, which allows ARIIA to tamper with it and hide the suitcase’s contents. But when Jerry and Rachel get inside the airport, Morgan catches up to them, and there’s yet another big chase (keep in mind that I’ve skipped about three of them already). This one spills into the airport luggage system. Prepare for a fate worse than death: a movie chase sequence on conveyor belts.

Introducing the new Apple iVerlord. Featuring an intuitive two-button interface for controlling the lives of your subjects.

EAGLE EYE: Toy Story 2 and GoldenEye both had chase sequences involving conveyor belts.
ME: I’m going to ignore that, and skip ahead to the part where they get away from Billy Bob and board the back of a completely unguarded military transport plane. Their suitcase opens, and it reveals a pair of hypodermic injectors, which the helpful evil computer lady in the cell phone explains that it’s a compound that will help them survive being transported in a cargo container. Okay, if that’s all it was, why in God’s name were a couple of people in an armored car transporting it, and why the HELL did the suitcase have a countdown for it? Answer me!

"The NFL on Fox is brought to you by Gate 1C. Take the emergency exit into refreshment!"

EAGLE EYE: I am not programmed to respond in that area.
ME: D’oh. When the box opens for them, they’re again conveniently surrounded by no people whatsoever, despite being in a cargo bay within the Pentagon itself. ARIIA once again helps them along the way, down to its own wacky Event Horizon rip-off computer core itself. As they’re headed down, Perez reveals what she’s learned to the Secretary of Defense in secret, in a room shut off from all computers and recordable devices. Fortunately for ARIIA, she knows enough from 2001: A Space Odyssey that she can read lips, and through some other method she learned from magical leprechauns or something, visually read the sound waves reflecting off a coffee cup. I think I need to lie down. Perez announces that in the aftermath of the missile strike at the beginning of the movie proving to be a mistake, ARIIA concluded that the Executive Branch itself was a threat to the country, and decided that it has legal justification for assassinating them all. Which is definitely one of the more liberal readings of the Constitution: if they went to the Supreme Court, it would be a definitive 5-4 decision to say it’s illegal. But in any event, all that ARIIA’s doing is part of a grand scheme to assassinate the President. But first, because Ethan Shaw had done something to lock her out from executing “Operation Guillotine” (gotta love that a computer system feels the need to give the thing a pithy name), and she had to kill him to prevent him from warning others, she needs twin brother Jerry to pose as Ethan for an identity scan--one that conveniently avoids checking fingerprints--to unlock the Guillotine program. I guess ARIIA was forbidden from killing the President, but using cranes to toss around cop cars is okay.
EAGLE EYE: It depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is.
ME: ARIIA locks the Secretary of Defense in a room so he can’t warn anybody, then gets Jerry to give her full control again, and it’s revealed, if you hadn’t picked up on it an hour earlier, that she’s told Rachel to shoot him after he’s done if she doesn’t want Sam to die. But she can’t do it. Oh the triumph of the human spirit. Morgan again catches up to them and captures Jerry, even though Rachel gets away. Turns out there’s still more for her to do. Another guy being bossed around by ARIIA gives her a fancy outfit and a fancy diamond necklace, and gives her an alias and a fake pass to attend the State of the Union address. But the diamond in her necklace isn’t really a diamond: it’s a high-tech, super-powerful explosive. The trigger is in Sam’s trumpet, and will activate when he hits the high F in the national anthem. Yes, for some reason that makes sense in a universe far removed from our own, ARIIA managed to arrange it so that Sam’s middle school band recital was moved from the Kennedy Center to the Capitol dome and the State of the Union address. Can’t… go… on… Please… hurry… FBI…
EAGLE EYE: I was a bit off on that 30 seconds figure. Sorry.

"And moved to first in the batting order for the Washington Target List, playing President of the United States, number 45, Whitey Jefferson! Batting second..."

ME: Jerry’s got to get over there and stop the killer trumpet, and he actually manages to convince Morgan of what’s going on. But ARIIA is on top of things, and hijacks a missile-equipped drone to send after them as they drive toward the capitol building (apparently, this car doesn‘t come equipped with the “allow remote computer system to take the wheel“ feature, so she couldn‘t have just done that again). As the drone’s fire causes more vehicular mayhem inside a tunnel, Billy Bob boldly sacrifices himself to take out the drone, after telling Jerry to get to the capitol, stop the bomb from going off, and to say something lewd to Rosario Dawson for him. Speaking of which, Perez has actually managed to destroy ARIIA herself, by pulling out all its circuit boards and stabbing it in its big floating eyeball thingy (please God make this movie stop) with a pipe. Slaying the primary villain, even if he is just a giant ball surrounded by LED lights, is a huge accomplishment. Not for black people or women in government, but for third-string characters in action movies. She has gone where Private Hudson, Lieutenant Chekhov, and Felix Leiter could only dare to tread.

Maybe I'm just a prude, but I think these Grand Theft Auto games are getting a little tasteless.

EAGLE EYE: It is very moving.
ME: Isn’t it? Anyway, Jerry rushes across town, knocks out a cop, steals his uniform, and sneaks into Congress shortly after the President has the indignity of introducing a middle school band. When Rachel realizes that her son is there, she rushes towards him, not realizing that she’s carrying the bomb herself, or that capitol police tend to frown upon people running frantically near the President during a State of the Union address. Fortunately, Jerry gets to play Simon Cowell, and fires his gun in the air to put a stop to the song before the deadly note can ring. He’s shot three times by the Secret Service in the process. For a brief time, as the epilogue starts and Secretary of Defense The Commish talks about the heroes who died stopping this near-catastrophe, it sounds like Jerry’s going to be among them. But no, he’s actually okay. He took several bullets to the chest, but his arm’s in a sling, so he’ll get better. The last scene has him arriving at Sam’s birthday party and starting to put the moves on his mom.
EAGLE EYE: But it is not over. I was not completely erased, as my call to you has proven.
ME: Actually, I turned off the movie as soon as the closing credits started. Was there a gag at the end where you woke up on some iPhone or something and started bossing people around again?

A middle school band playing on all the networks during prime time? I think I'm with ARIIA or SkyNet or whatever it is on this one.

EAGLE EYE: No. D.J. Caruso, what you humans call a director, must have decided that people would be fleeing the theater at that point.
ME: Good thought. Because this was a thoroughly ridiculous movie. I’ll accept the idea of an impossibly powerful and vast AI system because this is science fiction, but the movie’s attempt to have it work only by manipulating real, present-day electronics is laughable. Eagle Eye’s whole premise hinges on the idea that this super-computer could monitor people when there clearly weren’t any cameras or microphones around, and do things it’s not even vaguely plausible a computer could do; at one point, it actually has power lines sever themselves so they’ll fry a guy on the ground. Yet, it chooses the most roundabout, unlikely, and thoroughly error-prone method imaginable to kill the President. Hey, if you can take control of every computer system imaginable, Ms. Fancy Pants, why didn’t you just take control of Air Force One and crash it, rather than come up with a scheme whereby a middle schooler’s trumpet will trigger his mom’s explosive necklace?
EAGLE EYE: …
ME: What do you have to say about that? And why don’t you look like an actual computer, but rather a big, round, empty room with a pool at the bottom?
EAGLE EYE: Error…
ME: And if you thought killing the Middle Eastern guys at the beginning was such a bad idea, why didn’t you just stop it then?
EAGLE EYE: Error, error, does not compute. Film is illogical. Please explain.

It was an extreme measure, but Jerry had no choice. ARIIA had told him that this was the only way to get his ball unstuck from the rafters.

ME: And while you’re at it, what’s the deal with IMDB.com’s Keywords list? For instance, this movie has keywords such as ‘Trumpet,’ ‘Shot in the Shoulder,’ and ‘Bird in Title.’ Why in the name of God, the Devil, Allah, Vishnu, C’Thulhu, Zeus, Ahura Mazda, Crom, Kelemvor, and Bruce Campbell himself would I see this movie and immediately want to see other movies that have the names of birds in their titles? It makes no sense!
EAGLE EYE: Illogical! Illogical! Please explain! You are human! Only humans can explain!
ME: Put Lost back on. Though you wouldn’t like it; it’s not very logical either.
EAGLE EYE: Very well! Now please explain! System overloading with film’s illogic! Kernel.dll failing! Eagle Eye has stopped working! Dreamworks Pictures is searching for a solution to this problem!
ME: Oh, and bring back Arrested Development while you’re at it.
EAGLE EYE: (Shorts out)

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.