In the interest of full disclosure, I did not see the three Indiana Jones movies in order, nor did I see the first two when they were released in the theater. I only saw the third in a theater because it was playing around the corner at the $2 theater, and I appreciate a bargain. In fact, I did not lay eyes upon Raiders of the Lost Ark in its entirety until two years ago. I heartily enjoyed it. Harrison Ford is a charming rogue, Karen Allen is a refreshingly feisty love interest, and the Nazi/face melty/lost ark adventure yarn was a blast. Then my friends showed me Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to complete the double feature. They’d been fans when they saw it as boys. Upon seeing it again, they shared my newbie response: “Wow. That…sucked.” We didn’t revisit Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, although I do remember having a good time when I saw it in 1989. Hey, it featured River Phoenix and I had no prior Indy experience for comparison—what’s not to like?

Anyway, this is all an elaborate preamble to make the point that a) I’m not a kneejerk Indy hater, b) I do know from whence Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came, and c) the friends with whom I saw it were hardcore fans of the franchise. Indeed, I saw it with eleven people (mostly men) who could be considered the target audience: old enough to have seen and loved the originals as children. Eleven people who got it together to go see it opening night. Now, this is not to say that we didn’t have our trepidations. We remember what it felt like to be royally screwed by The Phantom Menace. One of the crew even watched Temple of Doom again to lower his expectations. So when a significant number of this group started murmuring and groaning audibly early on, I knew I wasn’t just feeling dyspeptic.

It’s an interesting thing to pinpoint when a movie loses you, or at least when you start to have that sinking feeling because you’re not involved in the action the way you want to be. On one level, this Indiana Jones was lost to me and the friend next to me during the opening car “race” on a desert highway. He started reciting, “Duel…Sugarland Express…” in my ear. Instead of shushing him, I replied, “American Graffiti.” Oh dear. Still, nobody in our row was ready to give up hope two minutes in. Craggy Harrison and his iconic fedora made an appropriately iconic entrance. Indy cracked wise about Cate Blanchett’s cheesy Rocky & Bullwinkle “Ukrainian” accent as psycho Soviet Communist psychic Irina. We got to see a glimpse of the Ark, which is a nice wink to the movie that started it all. The action sequence in the warehouse was a whip-cracking good time. Okay. Then the getaway included a reaction shot of CGI prairie dogs. That apparently was the moment Kingdom of the Crystal Paycheck became dead to the organizer of our movie night. Hey, I understand. CGI prairie dogs can do that to a person. I wasn’t quite ready to start heckling, although the subsequent Indiana Jones and the Miraculous Refrigerator sequence would try anyone’s patience. As Indy watched the nuclear blast straight out of a legendary Lyndon Johnson campaign ad, though, I began to brainstorm titles for the fifth installment: Indiana Jones and the Neuroblastoma. Indiana Jones and the Bulbous Tumor. Indiana Jones and the Last Chemo. Oh dear.

When Shia LaBeouf’s Mutt showed up on his motorcycle in pure Brando drag, I guffawed—probably not the intended effect. Those not familiar with The Wild One merely wondered where the rest of the Village People were (definitely not the intended effect). My friend next to me made a query he would repeat like a mantra for the rest of the film: “Really?” The subsequent Big Exposition diner sequence, however, nailed precisely what else ailed the film beyond strained 1950s signifiers and CGI prairie dogs emoting. As with the opening car race, the diner scene made me think of American Graffiti. Now, I’m well aware that with Raiders of the Lost Ark, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg wanted to re-create and pay homage to the Saturday morning movie serials they loved as children. They wanted to make an old-fashioned romp with new technology. In other words, Raiders actually had an artistic point beyond lots o’ fun and buckets o’ cash. A nod to the first Indiana Jones in the fourth installment is one thing. It’s a serial. But nods to Lucas’s and Spielberg’s other, non-Indy films? That’s a giant, creatively bankrupt celluloid circle jerk. Rather than paying homage to the movies that inspired them, Lucas and Spielberg seem more intent on just paying homage to themselves. Too bad they forgot how to structure a story that could justify their love.  

The rest of the film became an increasingly joyless mess. I realize these stories are meant to be outlandish, but come on. The deeper Indy gets into the quest to return the plastic, sorry, “crystal” skull to its proper resting place in El Dorado, the sloppier and more alienating the film gets. Spielberg makes a point of showing us that Marlon/Mutt’s motorcycle makes the trip to South America with Indy and Mutt, but then it makes two more brief, pointless appearances before it vanishes from the story (which is a shame, because the motorcycle chase through Yale was one of the best parts of the movie). What happened to it? Who cares? Also, they’re in South America in the 1950s. Were we the only ones wondering why Spielberg and Lucas didn’t jump on one of the few apposite instances of self-referentiality—it’s a serial—and throw a few Nazis into the mix? They’re already bringing back Karen Allen. They’ve already shown that they have no desire to make any of it the least bit “believable” (or coherent). Why not have some Nazis on the run join the Commies in trying to off Indiana Jones and claim the great Whatsit. Well, maybe they thought Nazis would overly complicate the stew of puerile action they had in store for Indy and his spawn.

Still, we all cheered when Karen Allen finally showed up, and did a new version of her smart ass greeting to Indy. Hooray! Let the fun begin. But no. That brassy “it’s about time you showed up” was a feint, not a harbinger of Marionisms to come. Sure, she gives Indy some critical news while they are both stuck in a $5 quicksand set left over from Gilligan’s Island, waiting for Mutt to return and rescue them with his snake (um, ew). But after that, she only seems to be around to whine, simper, and do exactly what we knew she would do as soon as we laid eyes upon her car-chase vehicle and whispered, “That car looks a lot like a boat—and they’re near a river.” Indeed, her role in that elaborate jungle car chase is emblematic of her presence in the film. She seems to be a vital participant as one of the drivers, and then she suddenly disappears for a large chunk of the action, completely forgotten by the filmmakers as well as the characters. But, hey, she miraculously reappears Just In Time. Perhaps Spielberg and Lucas realized that audiences needed to be distracted from the utterly ridiculous spectacle of Shia of the Jungle and his Flying CGI Monkeys (really?). Perhaps they were hoping that we’d forget the gloriously sassy Marion from Raiders, and not care that she’d been reduced to another mewling plot function in the Indiana Jones universe. Come on, boys, you can’t have more than one genuinely forceful female at a time in a movie? Swashbuckling, mind-controlling Irina filled that quota, and anything more would be too much? Apparently, yes. Besides, Mutt needs to save his bruised balls by not losing to Irina in their high-speed fencing match. Pay attention to that, people. Forget about whatever Marion is doing. It doesn’t matter.

Naturally, Mutt is a far more important commodity than Marion. It’s quite clear (crystal clear, if you will) that Spielberg et al. are positioning Mutt to take over the franchise from long-in-the-tooth Indy. That’s why he gets to have the sword fight with Irina. He has to prove that he’s worthy of taking on all potential villains by going blade to blade with a woman who commits the double sin of having the ability to control men’s minds (again, a plot thread that is raised as important and then summarily dropped), and wield a mean sword. Just in case we don’t get exactly what’s a stake, there are a lot of conveniently placed cacti (in the Amazon rain forest…really) that repeatedly whack Mutt in the crotch as he struggles to prove his Indy bona fides. Thanks, Steven. Nice to see you’re still a five-year-old when it comes to matters of men, women, and sex (Mutt doesn’t like it when Mommy kisses Daddy, either. Maybe the fifth one will be Indiana Jones and the Oedipal Rage). I don’t care how well executed this chase sequence is. This isn’t a good time. This is exhausting.

At last, our heroes make it to El Dorado after defying all laws of survival while presaging amusement park rides to come by tumbling down not one, not two, but three, three waterfalls. Really. They enter the chamber where the skull must go. We all started muttering Battlestar Galactica jokes to each other (nerd alert!). And then the woeful grand finale began. Now, it’s tempting to give Lucas and Spielberg the benefit of the doubt and say that the cheeseball alien angle was a nod to 1950s Cold War science fiction flicks like The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Unfortunately, it plays like Spielberg decided somewhere along the line that what he really wanted to do was remake Close Encounters of a Third Kind. Or at least remind us all of a time when he was capable of surprising audiences in a good way and harnessing childlike wonder. For in the end, what we were left with wasn’t a feeling of pleasurable nostalgia. It was the crushing disappointment of watching once-nimble filmmakers recede into pedestrian writing and childish narcissism. And that’s no fun at all.