The Whip & The Hat

The family that sat next to me was excited to be here—sort of. Mom and Dad were. They looked to be of an age to have seen the original Raiders of the Lost Ark as Star Wars-worshipping kids; maybe they saw the last movie in the series, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for a first date 19 years ago. And I don’t doubt they were happy to be able to get a group of a half-dozen or so into this preview screening for free, thus keeping the cost of the evening out in the two-figure range. (Well, assuming they didn’t have to drive too far to the theater.)

The kids, on the other hand, were somewhat less anticipatory. This pack of tweenies wanted to sneak into the screen next door that was showing Baby Mama.

“Can Steven Spielberg still do it?” everyone in the business is asking, though they mean it in different ways. On the one hand, can he deliver the kind of pulse-racing entertainment that will rouse and delight audiences? On the other, can his name and that of his fedora-wearing, whip-cracking hero break Spider-Man 3’s box office records with a $100+ million opening weekend? (Those should be the same question, but they’re not.)

I neither know nor care about the latter question. I flunked accounting, but learned enough of it to realize that it’s all smoke and mirrors, especially in Hollywood, where box office numbers say whatever they are needed to say. (Witness the attempts to ameliorate the miserable box office figures for Speed Racer a few weekends back.)

But as to whether he could do it, I’m happy to report that there’s life in the formula yet. Despite its clunky title, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the best movie in the series since the first one.

The career that’s really riding on this is not Spielberg’s, or even that of George Lucas, who devised the characters in the first place a quarter of a century ago (with Philip Kaufman) and who contributed the screenplay here (with David Koepp).

Shia LaBeouf, Harrison Ford, and Karen Allen in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

No, the guy who needs a hit is the one who reportedly got this ball rolling in the first place, Harrison Ford. He may have felt in the two decades since Last Crusade that he was too old for this kind of stuff, and at the age of 65 it’s hard to argue with him. But aside from Air Force One in 1997 and What Lies Beneath in 2000, he hasn’t exactly been burning up the box office recently.

Happily, the role still suits him and brings out the best in him, even if the film does sometimes seem on the verge of sinking under the weight of its own history. It could have done with fewer self-consciously iconic shots of Jones’ fedora, and a lot less of John Williams’ score, which is familiar to the point of cliché.

The story, if you care, takes place in 1957 and pits Jones against evil Soviet agents (“Russians,” he sneers in the tone of voice in which he used to mutter, “Nazis—I hate these guys”). In the bravura opening scene, they raid a US government warehouse in the Nevada desert in search of something that has been stored there since 1947. (See if you can guess what.)

Right off the bat, Spielberg shows that he understands the most important things about computer-generated effects: You have to use them to depict things that could plausibly happen, even if they would be unlikely to. We know that the septuagenarian Ford isn’t actually doing things that would exhaust the members of Jackie Chan’s stunt team, but none of it is so far-fetched as to take us out of the fantasy.

During a later scene in which two characters have a sword fight while standing on the backs of two jeeps careening down a jungle road at unsafe speed, it took awhile before it occurred to the spoilsport in me to remark that this was action created on a computer. But it’s so skillfully done that the seams don’t show, and Spielberg sells it to you with aplomb.

The story takes us into the jungles of South America where archaeology intersects with ancient aliens. The ending doesn’t quite work (Spielberg seems confused about which of his earlier films he was remaking here), but along the way it’s great fun. Cate Blanchett makes a splendid Russian villainess in Bettie Page haircut, a fetishy uniform and an accent that she gets to bounce off her palette with relish. John Hurt plays a crazy old professor, Jim Broadbent a more sane one, Karen Allen returns as Marion Ravenwood, and Shia LaBeouf plays a motorcycle-worshipping youngster (more Eric von Zipper than Marlon Brando) whose role in the proceedings when it is revealed is about as surprising as bad traffic on the 290.

So what if the kids aren’t excited about it? Everything else this summer is for them.