Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - 7.0

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull fortunately is an Indiana Jones movie (and the best part, it has freaking Indiana Jones in it!). While a bit campy at times, it has that fun and playful quality that makes the entire series (for the most part) so entertaining. Like its predecessors, it is pretty much non-stop action, no transitions needed, and don't forget to suspend your disbelief.

Some of the biggest positives and negatives come from interesting casting. Shia LeBeouf actually holds his own as Indy's new sidekick (and opens up the possibility of some more Indy sequels post-Harrison Ford, though as picky as George Lucas was about choosing the script for this movie, I'm not sure if I could really see this happening until after he dies) and Harrison was able to pull off the 65 year old action hero about as well as you could have hoped. My biggest problem was the lack of a menacing villain. As my dawg Randy Jackson might say, Cate Blanchett could act the phonebook, but unfortunately, this performance wasn't quite molten hot. The dominatrix outfit was strange, and her character, and the Soviets in general, never quite clicked as the evil foil to Indiana Jones' badass-ness like the Nazis did in episodes 1-3. The other problem was Karen Allen, reprising her role from Raiders as Indy's love interest, had absolutely no on-screen chemistry with Harrison Ford. I suppose it was refreshing that Lucas and Spielberg, et al chose to make Indy's romantic counterpart someone closer to his own age, but while Karen Allen wasn't nearly as annoying as Willie from The Temple of Doom, her performance didn't work like her original one did in Raiders or like the hot Nazi in The Last Crusade.

I watched the entire original Indiana Jones trilogy this week to get ready for the new one and I can comfortably rank #4 ahead of Temple of Doom (by far the worst of the series, ripping people's hearts out, child slaves, what the fuck was that?) and behind Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. It is far from a great movie, and I'm not sure what to think about the last 20 minutes, but 19 years later, Spielberg and Lucas more or less remembered how to make a successful Indiana Jones movie.