Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg rejoin forces, nineteen years later, for a fourth archaeological adventure. Ford, with his big-cat purr of a voice, remains an amiable fellow; and if he’s a bit jowlier beneath that crumpled face (like a wadded-up piece of paper retrieved from the wastebasket and mostly smoothed out again), and if he occasionally throws in a disarming grumble or groan in recognition of his advancing years, he nonetheless keeps pace with the physical action, or else his director cleverly covers for him during it, so that he shows no such signs of wear and tear as would demand any added suspension of disbelief beyond the several tons suspended already in the prior adventures. Spielberg, for his part, eager to show that Munich burned no bridges, any more than Schindler’s List or Amistad burned any, is still a superior technician. Superior, that is to say, to Michael Bay, Simon West, Brett Ratner, Roland Emmerich, Renny Harlin, John McTiernan, Jon Turteltaub, among other wannabes; and the relentless action scenes are always impressive in their engineering while never being in the least believable or involving. (A fencing bout conducted in side-by-side jeeps at top speed unfailingly focusses our attention on the filmmaker rather than on the fencers.) In the end — in the accumulation — the action grows more than a little tedious. Spielberg’s technique is superior not only to others’ technique but also to his own taste. A good long time, needless to stress, has gone by since the previous Indy adventure, and the new one can’t be content to try to top just that one. It has to try to top, in addition, The Da Vinci Code, the National Treasure hunts, the Lara Croft adventures, et al. With a plot that links Roswell, New Mexico, to the Erich von Däniken theory of evolution, Spielberg keeps pace in that race as well. To say so is no great compliment. Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf, Karen Allen, Ray Winstone, John Hurt, Jim Broadbent. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
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