Hey INDIE where art thou!

At a certain point inIndiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, there is a mundane exchange between Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) and a young Ed Burns (cookie where’s my comb) of the TV show 77 Sunset Strip and Marlon Brando (The Wild One) leather-jacketed college dropout (Shia LaBeouf), whose role figures prominently in the mechanics of a needlessly convoluted plot. Both Indiana and “Mutt” are headed toward the next juncture of their storyline, when Indiana, in a moment of throwaway exposition, inquires of Mutt’s schooling and ambitions in life. In response, Mutt describes having dropped out of several prestigious schools before finally settling on the profession of motorcycle mechanic.

Jones gives him a look.

“What–something wrong with it?” Mutt asks.

“No.” Replies Indy, “Not if it’s really what you want to do. And don’t let anybody ever tell you different.”

It’s an exchange which perfectly illustrates how to correctly telegraph an entire conversation into merely a few lines of dialogue, and yet, sadly, it is perhaps the only such exchange of real substance within the entire film. This is because, regardless of its monolithic production value, Crystal Skull has little urgency, and little creative prowess.

While in previous sequels, the iconic character of Indiana Jones has proven structurally sound enough to both support even the thinnest of storylines, and juggle the integration of new characters, here the dynamic fails. Without the much needed passion or any true element of power on the part of the antagonist to produce “real” danger–it’s all for wrought. And though Crystal Skull can at times be fun, it is generally plot-less and clumsily Xeroxes past elements from inferior films; many of which were inspired by its now classic predecessor, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Hence, Crystal Skull becomes a film which simply degenerates into nothing more than a snake eating its own tail, and the Lucas/Spielberg combination has produced a lackadaisical and truly unhealthy journey for what has now become an indifferent cardboard cutout of a character. A character which has been thrown into a movie he doesn’t really have a function in; sort of a fifth wheel on a truck without an Ark (no pun intended). Things seem to happen around him, as opposed to enacted by him, with other characters thrown in for good measure. Such as Marion (Karen Allen), who is not only under-utilized and under-appreciated; as is the cool, contemptuous Soviet uber-villainess Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett). Thus, the viewer is left with a movie that feels like a cobbled together pastiche of numerous very bad attempts at an hommage to 1950′s Sci-Fi, inserted arbitrarily and without any reverence for characterization, plot, or meaning. Thus birthing a film which greatly resembles the exact opposite of what the cinema of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas used to represent: good story telling and passion.