Indiana Jones And The Crystal Skull

Twenty years on from Indy’s last crusade and the all-action archaeologist is back: a little creakier but still sporting the trademark fedora, whip and wry grin. It’s 1957, the height of the Cold War, and Dr. Jones and his cockney sidekick Mac (Ray Winstone) are bundled from a car at Area 51, a secret military installation in Nevada. They’ve fallen into the hands of Soviet commandos led by Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) — a kind of younger, more fragrant Rosa Klebb — who wants the titular Crystal Skull as a powerful new Soviet weapon and needs Jones’s help getting it.

Several breathless getaways later, Indy hobbles back to campus to find himself at the centre of a McCarthyite witchhunt. Enter motorbiking rebel-with-a-cause, Mutt Williams, a Brando-lite played with assurance by up-and-comer Shia LaBeouf. The tearaway needs Indy’s help too, this time finding his mother and her companion Professor Oxley, held captive on the Amazon. In return he offers clues that could lead to the mythical Peruvian city of El Dorado and the Crystal Skull of Atakor.

The skull is an ancient Mayan artefact with the power to scramble minds and it certainly seems to have done the trick with George Lucas and fellow scriptwriter David Koepp (Carlito’s Way). What follows is a mind-bending concoction of anti-communist monkeys, Tarzan-style vine-swinging, killer ants and improbable waterfall plunges. Even old Indy flame, Marion Ravenwood, makes an appearance… could Indy be Mutt’s father? Could Mac be a double-agent? Do we care?

It’s a strangely uninvolving cocktail not aided by some zestless performances. Harrison Ford turns in his least charismatic Indy, while the usually luminous Blanchett is unconvincing as Spalko, with an accent that seems to alternate between the Kremlin and Cleethorpes. Her outfit of slate grey overalls, black leather gloves and fierce black bob doesn’t help: it’s not easy to ooze menace when you look like a motor mechanic on the way to an S&M party.

Lacking the tension provided by a truly sinister villain, the movie fizzles like a soggy sparkler and the presence of so many big name actors only refracts the storytelling in less interesting directions (does it really take the brilliant John Hurt to play Oxley, a mumbling cross between Professor Calculus and Worzel Gummidge?). More’s the pity because the first 40 minutes offer plenty of fun and glimpses of the Indy we know and love — a madcap motorbike chase through academia delivers him delightfully into, and then out of, the clutches of the Soviets — and a scene in a small town that turns out to be an H-Bomb test site is vintage Spielberg: funny, ghoulish and a perfect motif for the terror of the atomic age.

Sadly, though, where the first Indy films paid loving homage to matinée flicks of the ’30s and ’40s, this just feels like a money-spinning exercise. Gone at the smart lines and sharp wit, replaced with nonsensical blathering about ‘the space between space’ and an ending that gives the word ludicrous a bad name. It’s time to leave Indy to the cobwebs: this franchise has become a relic.

Rating: **