The Worst Crime for an Indiana Jones film is to be bland! Like many people my age - Raiders of the Lost Ark had an immense effect on me, it served as a catalyst for my loves of history, adventure fiction and writing. It is, for me, the perfect movie.
I have been waiting for this for 19 years and as I sat down to watch it in a cinema that was busier than I had seen it for years I began to get a good vibe - Indy was back.
However, two hours later I could only really question that statement - was Indy back? Really? Unfortunately for me the answer had to be no. Sure there was a man in a hat who looked like Indiana Jones and talked like Indiana Jones, but it was a pale ghost of the character that I had wanted to see and he was appearing in a listless, grey adventure that just never seemed to really get started. This wasn't the Kindgom of the Crystal Skull - this was the Kingdom of the needless exposition. Almost as soon as Indy appeared along with his old buddy Mac (a shamefully wasted Ray Winstone) we were being bombarded with information - there seemed to be a need to explain absolutely everything - we learnt that Mac had known Indy and had fought in the war with him. We learnt why the Russians were there and what they were looking for - we learnt far too much.
In earlier days did we ever find out how Indy and Sallah first met? No, there was no need.
The action was there and it should have been exciting but nothing grabbed my adrenaline glads and began to squeeze them. The humour was there but for such a packed cinema there was not one good belly laugh that went through the cinema. The jokes, such as they were, just happened - the sequence with the Marcus Brody statue was there and I'm not sure whether that was meant to be a joke or not.
The film has far too many characters and then just doesn't know what to do with them, Mac changes sides so many times that I found myself not caring. Oxley, a potentially interesting character was a cypher and nothing more. Indy acted so much out of character on so many occasions that I began to suspect that this wasn't actually an Indiana Jones script.
This was like if Eon had stopped making Bond films with Thunderball and then come back with Octopussy.
I have never felt so let down by a film in my life, even the Star Wars prequels did not disappoint me this much and I hated them.
This was like an Indy rip-off from 1985