The hat is back. After a long 19 year wait we get the next installment of the adventures of the mid-western university professor. Was it worth the wait?Well, er, no. Let there be no doubt, this film is an absolute stinker - it is awful.
Cate Blanchett seems to have wandered in from the adjoining film lot as she appears to be a SMERSH baddie from a 1970s Bond movie. Her accent is three parts generic East European villain combined with one part Chelsea; whenever she says "Doctor Jones" she sounds like she live just off the Kings Road. Ray Winstone plays a character called Mac whose reason for being in the film seems to pop up every once in a while and shout "Jonesy!" at the top of his voice. Shia LaBeouf (the bloke from the Transformers film) is Mutt Williams, a quiff adorned, leather jacket wearing teenager who is supposed to be some type of "Marlon Brando from The Wild One" character but actually ends up looking like a reject from a Village People tribute band. I could go on...
Are there any good bits. Well, yes. The start shows promise with a nice 'Area 51' allusion and some references to McCarthyism in the USA - although this is partly undone when one the interrogators is played by the 'Janitor from Scrubs' and 'Jim Robinson/Marissa in The OC's stepdad/the bloke from Ugly Betty' is the senior army general. Harrison Ford is excellent, he still has great comedy timing and screen presence. Karen Allen, from the first film, returns as Indy's love interest but doesn't get enough screen time. Jim Broadbent is wonderful as Indy's university boss, but even that sub plot is inconsistent - Indy is threatened with the sack yet he is a tenured professor...
It's a mish-mash. Spielberg said he wanted to reduce the use of CGI in this film - yet two big scenes, a nuclear explosion and the grand finale, are simply rammed full of CGI 'magic'. Lucas said he didn't want to make another Indiana Jones film until he had a story and script of sufficient quality. If this is the best he could find after 19 years - a story that seems to have given up half way through and simply added some leftover pages from an X-Files episode to pad it out - you wonder what on earth he rejected.
The hat still looks great, and the soundtrack is excellent with those wonderfully familiar sounds, but overall you sort of wish that everyone, including you in the audience, simply hadn't bothered.
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