The 500th Indy

The movie is called Indiana Jones and the Whatever of the Doohickey. The title character is a quarter century older than he was in his first adventure, Raiders of the Lost Ark, but he’s still at it. By “at it,” I mean that he gets involved with an incomprehensible plot involving a mystical artifact, and for most of the movie he keeps leading the bad guys to the artifact and endangering the world in the process.

In Raiders, he found a Torah Holder of Infinite Power and, fortunately for him, lost it to a Nazi who tried to access its supernatural elements and had his face melted off as a result. In the second Indiana Jones movie, something happened, which for the life of me I can’t remember, but it was bad, and he turned into a bad guy who beat up a kid, and everybody had to eat monkey brains. In the third, Sean Connery was Harrison Ford’s annoying father, and there was a Nazi blonde played by an actress with the unfortunate name of Alison Doody, and if she had succeeded the Nazis would have won the war, but Miss Doody doodn’t, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t thanks to Indiana Jones.

He doesn’t exactly exhibit conventional behavior for a hero, and that is part of the reason Indiana Jones has become a worldwide icon. By making him into something of a stumblebum, an improvising schlep who gets beaten up and tied up and double-crossed and outplayed by the bad guys, director Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas made him a character the world roots for. He might have seemed intolerably perfect otherwise, this sterling example of human achievement, a conceit as delirious as his name–a bespectacled scholar one minute and a dashing international daredevil the next, who breaks hearts from Kathmandu to Shanghai. It’s said that the wondrous moment in Raiders of the Lost Ark when an eye-rolling Indiana takes out a gun and simply shoots a turbaned Egyptian fancily threatening him with a scimitar came about because Harrison Ford was desperately sick on the day of filming and couldn’t remain standing long enough to conduct the planned knife fight.

Of such serendipities are classic movie moments made. It is an understatement to say that Indiana Jones and the Thingummy of the Yada-Yada could use a few of them. Or one, even. The year is 1957. Evil Soviet agents and evil Red-baiting FBI agents roam the American countryside. “These are dark days,” a character says. He doesn’t mean they’re dark days because of the Russkies; they’re dark days because of the McCarthyites. Indiana Jones taunts a Russian colonel by declaring, “I like Ike.” Then he nearly gets blown up in a nuclear bomb test, which serves him right.

Soon, he ends up in South America on a quest for El Dorado. So does his old girlfriend, Marion Ravenswood (Karen Allen), the one who bested every grizzled Sherpa in Tibet in a drinking contest at that glorious Himalayan bar way back in Raiders of the Lost Ark. They are accompanied by a teen greaser (Shia LaBeouf) who dresses like Brando in The Wild One and gets into a rumble in a sweet shoppe straight out of an Archie comic.

Given the fact that these movies are supposed to be evocations of 1930s serials, the overarching concept is actually quite clever. It brings together the lunatic conspiracy theories about aliens crash-landing in New Mexico in 1947 with the once-popular charlatan notions of Erich von Däniken, whose bestselling 1960s tract Chariots of the Gods provided false proof that extraterrestrials had landed in Peru and taught the Incas everything they knew.

But that is where the cleverness ends. There is not a moment in this movie we haven’t seen before and done better elsewhere: Fights on the hoods of moving trucks, journeys through hidden passageways, confrontations with pesky natives, a boat going over a waterfall. There isn’t a scene to compare with the Himalayan bar, or the shooting of the Egyptian, or even the wild Chinese-language production number with which the second in the series, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, begins. The best bit–a showdown with a menacing army of red ants–isn’t remotely original. Instead, it’s a clear homage to one of the original disaster movies, 1954’s The Naked Jungle, in which a cruel Peruvian plantation owner played by Charlton Heston (yes, you read that right) loses his crop to an ant army.

Even more notable in the homage department is the way Spielberg lifts an entire scene whole from Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto–the 2006 movie about how evil the Mayan civilization was. Apocalypto is a remarkable and punishing piece of filmmaking, but isn’t Spielberg, founder of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, supposed to be a Lion of Judah? What is he doing stealing unabashedly from Malibu’s Most Wanted Anti-Semite?

Spielberg isn’t the only one doing imitations around here. Fresh off her Oscar-winning impersonation of Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator and her Oscar-nominated impersonation of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There, the Australian actress Cate Blanchett goes for the hat trick with a dead-on impression of .  .  . Natasha Fatale, the sidekick of Boris Badenov, the Soviet agents in the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. Her character, Col. Irina Spalko, is described as “Stalin’s favorite,” and she is supposed to be both savage and psychic; but she never actually tortures anybody and she never manages to read a single thought. There is nothing menacing about her. She seems more inclined to kiss Indiana Jones than to drag information out of him.

There are thousands of movies worse than Indiana Jones and the Skull of the Crystal Kingdom –(or the Crystal Kingdom of the Skull, or the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, or whatever it is). But its existence is a bit of a mystery. Steven Spielberg, the most famous director in the history of the cinema, can make any movie he wants to make; why a third sequel that offers him not a moment’s visual or storytelling challenge? George Lucas, the most financially successful moviemaker in history, has nothing to prove; why indulge in this kind of mediocrity? Harrison Ford hasn’t had a hit in a long time; maybe they wanted to help him out. Of all possible theories, this is the most pleasant.

But there are less pleasant ones. Such as: For men like Spielberg and Lucas, there is no such thing as being too successful. It is not enough to have made movies that earned in the billions. To remain a cinematic power, to continue to provoke respect and fear and awe, they must continue to generate box office, box office, box office. They may talk about making experimental films no one will want to see (Lucas) or dedicating themselves to cinematic versions of literary works (Spielberg), but that is all just talk. They are both billionaires, but they are not going to leave money on the table if they can figure out a way to pick it up and put it in their pockets.

Hollywood is as competitive as Wall Street. With this project, so mercenary in conception that it should have been called Indiana Jones and the Triumph of the Box Office, Spielberg and Lucas are making it clear they are going to cling to their predominant positions and not allow anyone to supersede them. And should anyone dare to try–well, there is always Indiana Jones and the Shark from “Jaws,“ or Obi-Wan Kenobi and the Temple of Doom.

John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.