'Crystal Skull' blissfully familiar

Harrison Ford returns as the iconic adventurer/archaeologist in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," opening today. The film reunites Ford with Karen Allen, right, who played his romantic lead, Marion Ravenwood, in the original film of the series, "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

Last Modified: Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 6:53 a.m.



STARS: Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf, Karen Allen
GRADE: ★★★★ RATED: PG-13 (adventure violence, scary images)
RUNNING TIME: 124 minutes OPENS TODAY: Hollywood 16, Ocala Centre 6, Old Mill Playhouse at Lake Sumter Landing in The Villages, Belleview Cinemas

"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."
Say it aloud. The very title causes the pulse to quicken if you, like me, are a lover of pulp fiction. I want goofy action - lots of it. I want man-eating ants, sword fights between two people balanced on the backs of speeding Jeeps, subterranean caverns of gold, vicious femme fatales, plunges down three waterfalls in a row and the explanation for flying saucers.
That's why no Indy adventure can match "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981). But if "Crystal Skull" (or "Temple of Doom" from 1984 or "Last Crusade" from 1989) had come first in the series, who knows how much fresher it might have seemed? True, "Raiders of the Lost Ark" stands alone as an action masterpiece, but after that the series is COMPELLED to be, in the words of Indiana himself, "same old same old."
Yes, but that's what I WANT it to be. "Crystal Skull" even dusts off the Russians, so severely underexploited in recent years, as the bad guys. Up against them, Indiana Jones is once again played by Harrison Ford, who is now 65 but looks a lot like he did at 55 - or 46, which is how old he was when he made "Last Crusade." He has one of those Robert Mitchum faces that doesn't age; it only frowns more.
He and his sidekick, Mac McHale (Ray Winstone), are taken by the cool, contemptuous Soviet uber-villainess Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) to a cavernous warehouse to seek out a crate he saw there years ago. The contents of the crate are hyper-magnetic (I love this stuff) and betray themselves when Indy throws a handful of gunpowder into the air.
In ways too labyrinthine to describe, the crate leads Indy, Mac, Irina and the Russians far up the Amazon. Along the way, they've gathered Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), Indy's girlfriend from the first film, and a young biker named Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf), who is always combing his ducktail haircut. They also acquire Professor Oxley (John Hurt), elderly colleague from the University of Chicago, whose function is to read all the necessary languages and explain everything.
What happens in South America is explained by the need to create (1) sensational chase sequences and (2) awe-inspiring spectacles. We get such sights as two dueling Jeep-like vehicles racing down parallel roads. Not many of the audience members will be as logical as I am and wonder who went to the trouble of building PARALLEL roads in a rain forest. Most of the major characters eventually find themselves at the wheels of both vehicles; they leap or are thrown from one to another, and the vehicles occasionally leap right over each other.
All leads to the discovery of a subterranean chamber beneath an ancient pyramid, where they find an ancient city made of gold and containing ... wait, I forgot to tell you they found a crystal skull in a crypt. Well, sir, it's one of 13 crystal skulls, and the other 12 are in that chamber. When the set is complete, amazing events take place. In appearance, the skull is a cross between the aliens of the special edition of Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and the hood ornaments of 1950s Pontiacs.
It is astonishing that the protagonists aren't all killed 20 or 30 times, although Irina will become The Woman Who Knew Too Much. Relationships between certain characters are of interest, since (a) the odds against them finding themselves together are astronomical, and (b) the odds against them NOT finding themselves together in this film are incalculable.
Now, what else can I tell you, apart from mentioning the blinking red digital countdown and the moving red line tracing a journey on a map? I can say that if you liked the other Indiana Jones movies, you will like this one, and that if you did not, there is no talking to you. And I can also say that a critic trying to place it into a hierarchy with the others probably would keep a straight face while recommending the second pound of sausage.


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