Years ago, Harrison Ford said that he would never play the character of Han Solo again were it offered to him, but he would consider reprising the role of Indiana Jones. If Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is any indication, he made the right choice. The Lucas/Spielberg/Ford team has finally brought us that elusive entity: a rockin’ sequel for a series, long on hiatus.
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull opens up in 1957 with a bunch of military personnel driving to their base in an isolated southwestern desert. A guard informs them on arrival that nobody is allowed to enter because of nuclear weapons testing, after which they reveal themselves to be Russians, then shoot the guard along with everybody else in sight.
They roll up to a warehouse and two figures are shoved out of the vehicle and off-screen. We see their shadows stand up … and one of them is wearing a fedora. Oh shit! You know what that means!
Soon Indiana Jones is crashing cars into each other, setting off nuclear blasts and generally fucking up commies left and right. “Drop dead,” he tells the Soviet operative Irina Spalko (played by the famous chameleon Cate Blanchett), then corrects himself, “I’m sorry. Drop dead, comrade.”
Reflecting the time period, Nazis are out and Communists are in, as Indy and Spalko race to gain and keep possession of an ancient crystal skull said to contain alien powers (yes, you read that right). Spalko wants it for world domination. Indy wants it because, well, he’s Indiana Jones.
Yeah, Crystal Skull feels like an old-school Bond flick sometimes, though the movie gives us an obligatory shot of 21st century well-roundedness as Indy returns from his first adventure to find out he’s fired from the university on suspicion of aiding the Russians. “The government’s got us seeing communists in our soup,” the dean of the college says sadly of the Red Scare. Ten minutes later, Indy’s back to the serious ruining of Russian shit. Points for effort, I suppose.
Blanchett and Ford make for a wonderful protagonist/antagonist team, with Spalko’s meticulous and diligent skill butting heads with Indy’s brazenly unrefined shit-eating grin (kind of an appropriate reflection of the actors, really).
Most of the supporting characters are new add-ons, and most of them are welcome.
The relentlessly awesome Ray Winstone plays Mac McHale, a jovial colleague/competitor of Indy’s. John Hurt plays a mentally decrepit former colleague of Indy’s, who manages an awesome character despite not talking and doggedly clutching the crystal skull for most of the movie. Shia LeBeouf starts out as a whiny greaser douchebag named “Mutt” (I am not kidding) and ends up as Indy’s sidekick, as well as something else. It’s awesome. You’ll see.
A character who makes an awesome return is Marion Ravenwood from the Raiders of the Lost Ark days, and her reuniting scene is almost a line-for-line mirror of a scene in the previous movie, but not in a bad way. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull winks at the audience more than a few times, actually, from Indy’s familiar classroom lecture to a statue on campus honoring Marcus Brody, to Indy remarking as the movie nears climax, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
Nostalgia does kind of win the day here, and the movie is a completely sweet throwback in all the right ways. Bad guys get dispatched by the dozens. Fight scenes are deliciously unrealistic enough to make a Buffy The Vampire Slayer choreographer blush. Enemies still have ridiculously slow reaction times and are terrible shots. And Harrison Ford still wins at sexiness, badassery and shit-eating grins.
Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull will satisfy old-school fans looking for a last hurrah, as well as new-school fans who’ve never seen the older movies, as well as pretty much anybody who watches movies and wants life to be fun. The Spielberg and Lucas-headed power team of yore has made a great return to form, and Harrison Ford proves that at 65, aging gracefully can be a wonderful thing.