JimK:   I have so much to say about this movie.  Buckle the fuck up, kids.  I’m pissed.  SPOILER ALERT!  Every word from this point forward has the potential to spoil the film, so proceed at your own risk.

First of all, let me get this out of the way: Shia LaBeouf is a fine actor.  I like him.  I am not an anti-Beoufer.  That having been said, if there has been a role that was more miscast in the god-damned history of film, I don’t know what it is.  Except of course any film starring Liv Tyler that isn’t Empire Records.

The Beouf is NOT A JONES.  He’s not.  He’s not worthy of the role, the title or the hat.  He’s just every inch the wrong actor for the job.  Too New York and at the same time too California.  Too short.  Too moon-faced.  Soft where Indy is hard.  Can’t do cocky.  Can’t do self confident.  Not in the way Indy needs it done.  Too short.  Did I mention too short?  Looks all wrong fighting.  No big stupid loopy brawler moves, which let’s face it, is classic Indy.  His fighting is all tight and trying to be cool, which is fine for the “greaser kid trying to hard” character, but there’s no way it will feel as magically fun as when Indy fights.

The Beouf simply is not Harrison Ford Junior in any way.  Look, I don’t care how much you want to turn the franchise over to someone so you can extend it, I get that, I do.  I see Daniel Craig rocking the Bond shit like a pro.  If you’re gonna do it, though, the actor needs to be right for the part, and Shia is not right.  No jaw.  No classic good looks.  NOT A JONES.  He looks like Henry Jones III like I look like Brad fucking Pitt.  I don’t look like Brad Pitt, BTW.  I look like I ate Brad Pitt and then shrank a foot.

It made so much sense when they cast Connery as Indy’s father.  Think back to Sean’s glory days.  He was a hot piece of meat with a chiseled face, and he actually looks like he could have sired a lanky, movie-star looking dude like Harrison.  Shai looks like he was born from an Allen, but not Karen.  More like Woody.

That’s first and foremost: Shia LaBeouf is completely and totally the wrong actor for this role.  Looks, voice, performance, physicality, he’s not right in any way.  You know who would have been perfect as Henry Jones III?

Ryan Reynolds.  I swear to god.  He’s smart-alecky, good looking in the classic movie star sense, he can get buffed up when necessary, he does action, and he can act enough to sell anything in an Indy script.  He’d be perfect.

Secondly - and I just watched Raiders the night before I went to go see Crystal Skull, so this shit is fresh in my mind - Who did they hire to photograph this thing, a blind monkey?  No, not a blind monkey.  Fucking Janusz Kaminski!  This guy can work a camera.  What the hell happened?  Where’s the majestic grandeur of some of the shots in Raiders? Just look at these images I borrowed from First Showing’s look back at Douglas Slocombe’s amazing work:

JimK:  You should hit the link to First Showing and look at the rest of the images.  It will remind you how amazing the first three looked.  It’s simply stunning.  Look at all that wide, empty space.  The angles, the use of shadow, the framing, it’s great.  It’s a throwback to the 30s while at the same time looking updated.  It was shot in 70mm and IMDB says the same cameras were used as in Crystal Skull, although Crystal Skull was shot in 35mm.  I’m not a film tech geek, so I don’t understand the nuances of camera and negative sizes and lenses, but I know that there is nothing that looks even half that good in Crystal Skull.  The entire film looks like it’s trying really hard to look something like an Indiana Jones movie, but no one could quite get what to do to make it look right.  It should be this grand, massive looking thing, and instead it felt almost cramped, visually speaking.  The use of shadows seemed forced, done only because they felt like it was part of the formula.  At first I thought it had to be the cinematographer that messed it up, but Kaminski is good.

I think know what went wrong, but I will save that for the end.  And this is not the last time you will read that sentence.

Third: WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO SPIELBERG?  Where is the action-noir direction?  Where’s the organic tension?  The pacing was rushed, like they were trying to pack 180 minutes of action into two hours.  There were maybe two beats where you could process what just happened.  The action was frenetic rather than exciting, creating completely false tension that never puts you on the edge of your seat.  The thing that ruins the film, though, is that there is just too god-damned much of everything except the one thing we wanted.  The film opens with Indy easily surviving a nuclear blast and THEN it gets silly. The chases are too long.  There’s too many of them.  Too many explosions.  Too many fucking waterfalls.  About 97 too many deus ex machinas.  Too much Tomb Raider and National Treasure, which is sadly amusing since Raiders gave birth to both those films.

After watching Raiders the night before, I noticed that you can tie the development of so many video games to the fact that so many game designers grew up on that movie.  Jungle level, temple level, market square in foreign land level…Raiders inspired video games.  Crystal Skull feels exactly like a copy of one.  Example: To enter the super-secret special heart of the god-damned space fucking ship (did I mention that there’s a god-damned fucking space ship in this movie?  A flying the fuck saucer?  I did?  OK, sorry) Indy holds up the Saran Wrap paperweight alien skull to a vaguely skull-shaped depression in the door.  It doesn’t fit like a key or anything.  In fact it’s not even the same shape.  He just sort of waves it at the hollow space and abracadabra hocus pocus, the door retracts from the middle, in slices, into the walls.  It looks for all the world like something you might see in a shitty Stargate game that has terrible physics and bad collision detection.

So what was the missing thing that we wanted?  Oh, I dunno, the fucking whip?  124 minutes, and the whip is used maybe twice?  Three times if you count his using it to try to haul Mac out of the ....no, I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s 52 fucking hat jokes though.  We rode that horse well past the sell-by date. 
I think know what went wrong, but I will save that for the end.

Fourth: Since when in the blue fucking fuck was Indiana Jones an OSS officer with a long career as a spy?  When, precisely, was that shit the fuck supposed to have happened?  I suppose since the first three films only cover 1912-1938, he joined up right after the events of Last Crusade, but…there was talk in Crystal Skull of him being a soldier as a young man, and as an OSS agent in the war. 

The thing is, I’m not sure why he had to be a war hero.  Other than to have the scene where the Big Bad Evil American Government Types In Black Suits stereotypes accuse him of being a commie and the Man In A Uniform stereotype defends him with a “Don’t you know who this man is?” line.  It was completely and totally unnecessary to the character or this movie.  It is simply extra flotsam that the viewer is forced to process and reconcile with what they already know.

I can fix that entire scene in a couple minutes.  Remove all reference to Indy actually serving and winning medals, and simply have Man In A Uniform stereotype guy defend him by saying ‘Do you know how many time this man has risked his life at the request of the United States government?  He’s a hero more times over than you are even cleared to know about.”

Done and dusted.  No extraneous information, no cluttering up the backstory, so “Huh?  Whaaaa?” moments for people that get Indy’s character.

Maybe I should explain; It’s my opinion that Indy would never join the military.  He needs to hunt artifacts.  It’s not just what he does, it’s who he is.  Yes, he loves his country.  Yes, he hates Nazis.  He also hates taking instructions from anyone, and he needs, needs needs to hunt artifacts and jump over chasms and run from big stone shit.  I don’t buy him signing up and serving in that way.  I think he would volunteer to do the crazy shit like hunt artifacts that Hitler wanted without being a military man, and that could cover the entire war.  It’s honorable, it fits his character and it’s not extra crap which sprang from the head of….no, I’m getting ahead of myself again.  I know what went wrong, but I will save that for the end.

Fifth: Aliens?  FUCKING GOD-DAMNED FUCKING ALIENS?  WITH A MOTHER-HUMPING BLESSED SPACE SHIP?  Oh you bastards.  Lemme check my actual ticket stub from last night.

JimK:  Oh, well fuck me.  I guess I did accidentally wander into The X-Files.  Guess that’s what I get for going on the cheap night.

Seriously, aliens with a ship? The crystal skull looked like it was made out of Lucite.  The inside brain part looked like wadded up plastic wrap.  It was a fucking horrible prop.

Aliens?  Really?  I was praying that the aliens didn’t move after the skull was returned, but yeah, it did.  Then I was praying that this wasn’t really a giant space ship, but yeah, it was.

Oh, while we’re here.  The point is made, over and over again, that the Conquistadors and every-fucking-body else have been looking for this place, known to whitey as El Dorado, forever and a day.  Oh ye fools, in search of golden treasure!  So… Indy and Ox and Marion and The Beouf find it with SCARY RUSSIAN BROAD close behind thanks to Mac’s double extra doublecross spy shit.  Lo and behold, it’s a jumbled up room full of gold and treasure, just like every other tomb movie or TV show you have ever seen, only this stuff is from all eras of history just exactly like National Treasure.  Indy makes a BIG DRAMATIC POINT that the aliens were archeologists.  Later, as a big moral lesson that greed is bad, Indy makes the point that the real treasure was knowledge.

Keep that in mind while I take you back to the very beginning of the film.  Russians shoot heir way into Area 51 and The Warehouse.  Big Russian Fuck hauls Indy out of the trunk of a car, and SCARY RUSSIAN CATE BLANCHETT drips a terrible Boris & Natasha accent at him.  Big Russian Fuck pulls out a bag of artifacts and says that he found Indy in Mexico, digging in the dirt for this stuff.  He throws it casually to the ground, and SCARY RUSSIAN MOOSE AND SQUIRREL MUST DIE lady steps on it like it means fuck-all.

The lesson is clear: These artifacts were important to Indy, and contains some knowledge about something he was studying.  He cared enough about them to save them.  They were a representation of Indy’s desire for knowledge over gold.  This is important because it is why he identifies so strongly with the aliens.  And the action ends with Indy explaining to his son that knowledge is the real treasure.

SO WHY DID THE BLOODY FUCKING ALIENS HOARD GOLD?  Why wasn’t the “treasure” room set up like a museum of the history of mankind?  WHY WAS IT ALL FUCKING GOLD?  What the effing eff?  Which is it, gold or knowledge?  Make up your god-damned minds people!

I know what went wrong, but I will save that for the end.  Oh, we’re at the end?  No.  No we are fucking well not, because the movie ends with Marion going from pissed at Indy to gazing at him without question on a hillside next to the place where THE GOD-DAMNED ALIENS JUST TOOK OFF.  Then, they get married.  MARRIED!  Indiana fucking Jones gets married!  He left this woman three times at minimum.  In this film we learn that the last time he left her was a week before they were supposed to be married.  And she never stops to question any of this, she just gazes at him like he’s steak and then marries him on the spot?

Indiana motherfucking Jones, killer of ladies’ hearts throughout the 1930s and 40s is married?  Really?  Why?  What’s the frickin’ point of it?  More extra junk. and NOW we’re at the end, and the reason for all of this.  In the summary for this post, I mentioned that this review could be summed up with one embedded YouTube video.  And that video is this:

JimK:  FUCK YOU, GEORGE LUCAS.  Never again will I pay you for a film.  You suck at writing, you suck at directing.  In fact, you suck at everything but broad-stroke conceptualizing.  You are the JJ Abrams of movies…well, OK, JJ Abrams is the George Lucas of TV.  You sucked and ruined your own work long before that shithead ever got started.  But fuck you, and fuck your whole fucking company and kiss my ass you jackoff.

Monkeys taught Shia to swing on vines?  What are we, six?  You can’t even use the excuse that this is a kids movie.  You knew this was going to be attended almost exclusively by nostalgic adults.  You suck.  I hate you and you suck.  You ruined this film, and I bet a billion dollars you crushed Spielberg every day when he tried to direct it.  I’ll bet you personally sat in on editing and fucked that up too.  I bet you *added* extra nut crushes to the jungle sequence and thought it was hysterical every time you saw it.

I bet you sat in a writer’s meeting, and every script meeting after that, and people gave you good ideas and asked you why the story needed so much extra bullshit baggage and you just smiled your stupid fat-faced smile at them and said “No, he’s going to be a war hero.  No, we’re going to have him get married.  No, we’re going to do three waterfalls, because three is bigger than one or two so it must be better.  Yes, I do think it’s funny that his son picked the name Mutt, because Indy was named after the dog, remember?  That’s comedy gold.  No, we’re not going to find other ways to use the whip.  Oh, and Indy doesn’t shoot people in the face or the back anymore.  Remember, I’m the Han Shot Second guy.  It’s my movie and fuck the fanbase and all of you.  I have the storytelling skill and sense of humor of a six year old, but I’ll be damned if anyone will tell me how not to ruin my damned creations.”

Lemme illustrate how to make a meaningful moment out of the stupid-as-fuck monkey vine sequence. 

Shia is leaping from car to car during the jungle fight scene.  Absolutely acceptable in an Indy movie.  At one point he ends up in one of the cars that Indy was in, and as he’s scooping up the skull, he notices that Indy dropped his whip.  He grabs it.  We cut to other parts of the chase and the fight.  Then we jump to the part where Mutt (I cannot fucking call him that, nor will I ever if he’s in Indy 5) gets hauled up into the vines by accident.  He sees a monkey swing away, and realizes the entire canopy is filled with swinging monkeys.  he looks at a vine and says something smartassy, then swings away.  He BARELY MAKES IT onto the vine.  He barely makes it onto the branch of a tree.  The vines are slippery.  he exclaims that this isn’t gonna work.  he realizes he;s seen Indy do some crazy shit with the whip.  this, of course, would necessitate that there be a five second scene earlier where Indy did some crazy shit with the whip…but let;s say it;s in there.  So Shia gets the nutty idea to try the whip.  “If the old man can do it, I can do it!”  And lo and behold, it frigging works.  He cuts through the jungle, since he can see the chase happening on the road, which is at the egde of the jungle he;s in.  When he swings out of the last tree into the Russki’s vehicle, first of all he barely makes it (that’s key!) and secondly, when he rejoins Indy, Indy gets indignant about his whip and snatches it back.

This allows us to see Mutt (for fuck’s sake…Mutt?) as a potential inheritor of the “crown & sceptre” (the hat & whip).  See how I solved that stupid shit in like, two minutes?  Fucking Lucas.

There is no point to so much of what happens in the film.  It’s like someone took a nice photo of Harrison Ford and started drawing on it with magic marker.  Actually, you know what it’s really like?  The Gus Van Zant remake of Psycho.  All the elements of the original were there.  It seems like it would be a no-brainer to make it halfway enjoyable.  But the magic was missing, and it was gummed up with bad performances and trickery.

Crystal Skull is just like that.  It should work.  The score is there, the director is there, Harrison looks fantastic for an old man, Karen is there and looks great, Shia’s a good actor, Cate’s a great actress…but it all failed on every level.  It was like an echo of greatness.  No, it was like an echo of the mediocrity of Last Crusade.  I wanted so much to like this movie.  I knew I was going to review it for the site, and I actually thought that even if I only half-liked it, I would try to stay positive because so many people were shitting all over it.  Well, they shit on it because it is a toilet.  Instead of rekindling my love for the franchise, Lucas made me feel like I was watching a ghost who refuses to move on.  Just like with Star Wars, he tried to kill everything good and magical about it and replace it with his narrow, emotionless, unimaginative idea of what is exciting.  he says it;s for kids, but kids have better imaginations than that.

I’m half surprised Indy 4 wasn’t 47 minutes of Dr. Henry Walton Jones Jr. debating in the newly-formed United Nations about international archeology protocols or some shit.

Fuck you, Lucas.  Die in a fire.  If you ever really die in a fire I apologize for that.  What I really mean is die slowly in a fire for real, you sonofabitch.

Summation: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is easily the worst of the four films in the series, and might actually be one of the worst archeologist-as-hero films I have personally ever seen.  Then again, I haven’t seen National Treasure: Book of Secrets.