Man, I was looking forward to the new Indiana Jones movie. The second one in the series was sort of so so but I loved the first, all two dozen times I've watched it, and the third was pretty darn good,too.

Spielberg and Lucas should have left the franchise alone. Either that or when Harrison Ford saw the first rushes of Crystal Skull, he should have used his whip to tear them into tiny fragments flushed them down the nearest toilet.

Seriously. It's that bad. So bad, in fact, that there aren't enough words synonymous with "sucks" to adequately describe it. I made it about three-quarters of the way through before I walked out.

It's the mid-1950's, in the midst of the Cold War. We start with Indy forced into the trunk of a car and taken to Area 51 where the oddest assortment of Boris Badenov Russian KGB-types make him look for and find the coffin of an alien first discovered during World War II. You'll remember the location immediately. It's the cavernous room where they stored the Ark of the Covenant in the last scene of the first Raiders. In fact, as Indy is escaping, the camera gives us a glimpse of a broken open box and, gosh, guess what's inside?

It only gets worse. Indy finds himself in a mock up of a 1950's small town and hides in a lead-lined refrigerator just in the nick of time before...a nuclear bomb goes off blowing him out into the desert and taking any hope of salvaging the wry fun of the Indiana Jones series with him.

I won't go on. Ford looks very old but his stunt double is as agile as a monkey. Unfortunately he also looks as though he's reading his lines off a prompter, trademark Indy squint and all. If they filmed any of this on location they managed to make it look like a huge soundstage. Bits that were funny in the first three movies are done to death and merely come off as silly here. The action scenes have a comic book feel to them. In fact, at times I wondered if this wasn't a Mel Brooks send-up of the franchise rather than a serious effort to reconstitute it.

In other words, Crystal Skull is a time waster and incredibly disappointing.

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Comment by Doug M. Cummings on May 29, 2008 at 9:04am
Ten bucks worth of being had, yes. Some darn good popcorn at that theatre though.
Comment by Doug M. Cummings on May 29, 2008 at 1:47am
Thinking about it, I did watch the chase/fight scenes in the rain forest with interest. He still can choreograph well. But the writing and the plot just didn't hold together.
On the other hand, The Andromeda Strain on A and E last night was terrific. Kept me in suspense the whole way through.
Comment by Clair Dickson on May 28, 2008 at 5:27am
I think that George Lucas should put us out or our misery and just stop making movies at this point. He's clearly all played out.

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