Old Man Jones

[May 21st, 2008]

“You’re not the man I knew 10 years ago,” Marion Ravenwood told Indiana Jones as she cleaned his wounds and examined his grizzled visage in Raiders of the Lost Ark. “It’s not the years, honey—it’s the mileage,” he replied. Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones has added many miles to the odometer since then—his new escapade, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, takes place in 1957, two decades after Raiders, and Harrison Ford now qualifies for AARP membership. In this long-anticipated romp, he’s not the man Marion Ravenwood knew 27 years ago: He’s better. Jones, once a rake and a mercenary, is now an advertisement for clean living. He’s quit the filthy whiskey, he’s a decorated war hero, and he is apparently impervious to injury. Where the Indy of old had to dodge a Nazi strongman until a plane propeller finished the fight, the Indy of Crystal Skull takes matters into his own fists, pummeling the Soviets’ largest soldier until he collapses into a hill of deadly ants. Powerful, wise, irreproachable: This man is what John McCain sees every time he closes his eyes.

Maybe Indy’s ageless vigor is a side effect of a previous brush with the Holy Grail, or perhaps it’s a product of Harrison Ford’s vanity (watching the actor leap from car to motorbike, I was reminded of the story of Kirk Douglas on the set of bad sci-fi flick Saturn 3, repeatedly asking the screenwriter if the robots could be made to remark, “That man is so virile!” each time Douglas ran past). Whatever the reason, it’s good to have the wisecracking archaeologist back, in any condition, and Crystal Skull is a giddy lark, worthy of the franchise—at least until it encounters the one foe Indiana Jones can’t overcome: The Curse of Steven Spielberg.

For the past decade, starting with AI: Artificial Intelligence and continuing with unnerving consistency through every movie he’s directed since, Spielberg has proven constitutionally incapable of arriving at a satisfying ending. Part of the trouble is that he expends his best ideas at the outset—so when, just 20 minutes into Crystal Skull, Dr. Jones manages to survive a nuclear explosion in the Nevada desert, racing among the Technicolor test dummies to seek shelter, it’s both the most ingenious and most alarming scene in the movie. Where can the film go from here? Could it be that Indiana Jones has already shot his wad?

He has, and the wad grows up to be (spoiler and bad pun warning!) Shia LaBeouf. That’s right, there’s a Henry Jones Junior Junior, and he goes by the handle of Mutt Williams—a clever joke, actually: Ol’ Sean Connery named the dog Indiana, and now Indy’s kid has named himself after dogs in general. LaBeouf, cast as the motorcycle-riding greaser child of Marion (Karen Allen), is obviously dressed to recall Marlon Brando in The Wild One, which is not unlike dressing Dakota Fanning to recall Bette Davis in All About Eve. No matter: By the time LaBeouf arrives to disrupt Dr. Jones’ study hall, Indy has already visited Area 51 and located little green men at the gunpoint of Cate Blanchett as a Commie agent with a widiculous Wussian accent. Crystal Skull is packed with this kind of Thrilling Wonder Stories boys’ pulp, true to the series’ zany serial roots and the gee-whiz mood of the ’50s. (Asked for his last words at gunpoint, Indy growls, “I like Ike.”)

A pity, then, that the third reel is such a washout, with Indiana Jones subjected to the late-Spielberg sanitation treatment—all his rough edges are rubbed away, and he’s left as the upright patriarch of a ragtag family on a South American vacation. The climax brings Indy full-circle, at least geographically: He’s back in the same jungles where he boulder-dodged at the start of Raiders, but instead of trading golden idols with Alfred Molina, he’s delivering helpful maxims like, “The treasure was knowledge.” (Indiana Jones says: Stay in school, kids!) He’s as active and robust as any geriatric hero to grace the silver screen, but there are moments—more than moments, really—when it’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that this magnificent artifact is a fake.