Indiana Jones 4 film rating and review

Indiana Jones 4 (2008) Film Rating and Review :

Rating :

Acting – 7/10
Direction – 8/10
Screenplay – 7/10
Music – 8/10
Technique – 7/10

Review :

The buccaneer is back

Nostalgia can be a dangerous thing — it can forge a connection as easily as it alienates, depending on who is speaking and how, and more importantly perhaps, who is listening.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is pure nostalgia. It is a loving revival by the team that created Indiana Jones 27 years ago — Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Harrison Ford — for an audience who grew up with him. Indy was their first date with a real adventurer, an action hero who was flesh and bones, who wasn’t born in the pages of a comic book, who had no superpowers and was not backed by technology or a team of agents out to save the world. Indiana Jones was a buccaneer, and that is what he remains.

But does the world need a buccaneer anymore?

If the unusually long gap in the Indy franchise — it’s been 19 years since The Last Crusade was released — has caused problems, it is not the expected ones. Harrison Ford, at 64, brings the same magic to the screen as he did two decades ago. Indy wears his age exceedingly well. Ford can look out from underneath his fedora and crack one-liners (as corny and as delightful as ever) and, by virtue of the lines on his face and the colour of his hair — the mileage as Henry Jones Jr would call it — it suddenly sounds like wisdom.

Are the near-death experiences improbable for a senior citizen? Of course, but they were just as ludicrous when performed by a 45-year-old, or by the 22-year-old Shia LaBeouf, who is very much the surprise package of Crystal Skull.

The problem with the film may turn out to be nothing as superficial as looks. It is that Indy was born into a very different world. In that world, a boulder hot on the heels of a man running through a dark cave was a heart-stopping thrill. It was a world where hi-tech gizmos didn’t make men fly, except in an always-unreliable prop plane.

His was an old-fashioned swagger. The crooked smile didn’t need to be straightened then, and now the wrinkles don’t need to be Botoxed beyond all recognition because Indy was, is, human.

There is only one modern-day equivalent that comes to mind: Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow, who belongs to the same scruff-of-the-neck, spur-of-the-moment, in-the-nick-of-time school of lunacy as Indy. Who is better? The heart says Indy; the mind says Captain Jack — even for a viewer for whom Indiana Jones represents one of the first unforgettable trips to the movie hall, for whom the first bars of the classic theme song bring back a rush of a different time, a different place, a different magic.

So where does that leave a young viewer, the one whose first brush with action was The Matrix? Will she be able to understand the delicious irony when Indy tells Mutt that he has brought a knife to a gunfight? Will she understand how special it is to see Spielberg return to the screen not only with Indy, but with some silly-looking old-school aliens?

Chances are, she won’t. Even if you switch off the cellphone, forget the Xbox and erase all memory of 2 Fast 2 Furious, she won’t understand why this film was made. It is like comparing a Pierce Brosnan Bond flick to a Sean Connery one. She might even think to herself that Crystal Skull was fun, but wasn’t it a little like National Treasure 2? And that would be a tragedy indeed.

Is Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — which seems destined to be followed by a long-planned Part V — a brilliant movie? Far from it. But then, were any of the Indy films?

Spielberg is far too shrewd to change the nature of Indy, to make it cinema with more than half a brain. Just like he would never alter his script to suit his star. So if Cate Blanchett’s death-eyed Irina Spalko seems flat, it is because she is supposed to be. An Indy villain was never too interesting, and definitely not believable (remember Amrish Puri’s appalling Mola Ram?). And a Russian in 1950s America that is seeing the Reds everywhere could only be the comical, heavily-accented caricature that Blanchett plays to perfection. She knew she wasn’t signing up for another Oscar nomination. If anything, the political incorrectness of a cardboard cutout baddie is an Indy tradition she would willingly participate in.

The film does have character — tonnes of it — but don’t go looking for it anywhere else but under that familiar, worn, brown fedora. Yes, Karen Allen’s Marion lights up the screen with her warmth once again; Mutt’s bristling machismo begs to be loved; but to give them too much more to work with would be to distract from what the film is really about — Indy getting back together with Ford, Spielberg and Lucas for another glorious, impossible romp.

The film looks the same as it did 19 years ago, a minor miracle given how far technology has taken us, and it sounds the same too. Forget Elvis, whose Hound Dog turns the clock forward to 1957 in the opening scene. As the unmistakable bars of Indy’s music play, it all comes back with a rush of affection.

And that is what an old fan would leave with — not admiration, not awe, not respect, but a fond remembrance of past adventures and a smile on the face to see that Indiana Jones has done it again.

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