When Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came out, I wasn’t impressed with it. The action scenes were flabby and unexciting, the humour was half-baked, and they appeared to be intent on destroying the characters. However, over the years, a strange thing happened. I remembered the film with a certain fondness, and when I bought the Indiana Jones collection, I sat down ready to be entertained. As I watched it, I remembered all my niggling problems with the film, and got annoyed with it all over again – but it did have a lot of charm that I ignored the first time around, particularly in the interactions between Jones Snr. and Jnr. It is not a bad film, but it does seem to be somewhat lacking.

It’s actually very difficult to pin down what’s wrong. Rather than one big thing, it’s an accumulation of niggling small things. This review will be even more petty than usual, because the changes I would make to the film are minor but many.

George Lucas, in some respects, suffers from the same disease as Douglas Adams. In his earlier works, he builds an enormous, complex world with contradictions and throwaway details, all of which intrigue and fascinate. And in his later works, he tries to pull all of these fascinating details together and explain them and explore them in greater detail. This can be a perfectly valid technique, but I suspect that in George Lucas’ case, it is out of fear of pushing the conventions that he has established in the previous films. Hence, while Last Crusade repeats the plot of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (Indy races nazis seeking holy Christian artefact for purposes of world domination) it strikes of laziness rather than the desire to do a true variation-on-a-theme.

Last Crusade is all too happy to turn its gaze navel-wards. For example, the start – Indy in Scouts discovers grave robbers after holy cross – is rife with in-jokes and explanation for the throwaway points of the previous films. We discover where Indy got his hat, the scar on his chin, his fear of snakes, his bullwhip, and the fact that his adventuring garb and appearance are inspired by one of the grave robbers. It is fun at first, but becomes overly cute by the end of it. I preferred it when Indy wasn’t thoroughly “explained”. For the beginning sequence, I’d have made the grave robbing leader less like Indy in character, even if it did mean weakening the first big reveal – that Indy is the scout, not the hat & leather jacket guy. I suspect part of the reason this didn’t work well for me is the obvious parallel. Lucas was inspired by old adventure serials to create Indy, and Indy himself was inspired by a character from one. It’s not a major fault, but as I mentioned – my problems with the film are not major, but ones of tone and nuance.

We come to my second problem with tone in the fight aboard the ship, as Indy recovers the cross for the second time, then jumps overboard in time for the ship to explode. This is a good example of the poor action that seemed to plague the film. The action seems oddly sluggish; bad guys stand around waiting to be hit, the leader appears not to notice anything had gone wrong, and a big box of dynamite happens to conveniently explode after Indy has gone. Perhaps this is just the age of the film showing (though goodness knows, poorly directed action sequences are not a forgotten art) but I’d have at least had Indy noticing the dynamite was about to blow up. In fact, if his fight had involved the dynamite, it might have been more exciting. Perhaps the bad guys banging him against the crate dislodge something and start a timer, which Indy notices because he’s being strangled right next to it – or Indy starts the timer himself to make the bad guy stop strangling him and reach out to stop the timer.

This is the point at which we also notice the much more child-friendly atmosphere of this film. Fair enough, in the young-Indy sequence we shouldn’t see any blood or grossness, but this lack is particularly noticeable throughout the rest of Last Crusade as well, particularly after the excesses in Lost Ark and Temple of Doom. For my taste, the envelope-pushing gore in Lost Ark was just right, just nasty enough to add spice to Indy’s peril. There are only a few moments in Last Crusade that even show blood – Indy shooting a guard in a castle, a bit of blood on Jones Snr. when he gets shot, the tank driver, the three-nazis-shot-with-one-bullet, and the usual cosmetic blood on Indy himself. There is a telling contrast between the gore of the bad guys’ heads melting and exploding in Lost Ark, and the bad guy disintegrating into dust in Last Crusade. It even lacks most of the nasty intent behind Lost Ark – we never saw the German mechanic being hit by the airplane propeller, but we could certainly imagine it. I really think the gore (expressed and implied) made it a more thrilling film. It showed just what would happen to Indy if he weren’t quite so quick.

There were a few “features” of the series that were beginning to get tired by the time we reached the third film. Indy’s slash ‘n burn archaeology may be period-accurate, but it is somewhat appalling when he uses champagne to wash clean an ancient stone tablet, or smashes the stone floor of the library, goes into the catacombs, and immediately uses the femur of one of the corpses as a torch. The oil on the surface of the water made this an idiotic move as well. We even see bits of burning rag drop from the torch every now and then, and it’s rather a surprise that the guardians of the grail are able to set it alight with just a dropped lighter. If Indy had used an electric light, and had been very careful about sparks, we might have felt their ongoing danger. And we never find out the source of the oil – could it have been a booby-trap to kill unwary intruders? If so, we might have seen some flint & steel traps at some point. There are any number of ways his expedition through the catacombs could have been more exciting – even the expected rats (Snakes, spiders, bugs, rats – what’s left now? Crocodiles?) didn’t provoke much reaction. By this point, we’re familiar enough with the conventions to know they’ll have to tromp through the middle of them, having rats crawl around their hair, and so on. This is an ideal opportunity to play with that expectation. Perhaps they find a way around the rats at first, so that when the firestorm hits and the rats run all over them, it’s more icky – the rats are panicked and biting, and that’s just the ones that aren’t on fire.

By the time we hit the third film, Lucas’ humour is becoming more evident. This is not quite at the level of Jar Jar Binks and the fart jokes of Star Wars: Episode 1 yet, but there are already some rather belaboured, lame bits of comedy showing through. The Scotsman “inspecting the tapestries” ruse falls about as flat as it is possible to fall, Marcus’ efforts to evade the nazis in Alexandretta, Indy’s avoidance of his many fans, Hitler signing the grail book, the romance between Indy and Elsa – all these bits of comedy are, at best, cute. I’d have cut them, or at least twisted them. For example, Marcus is absolutely incompetent and falls directly into the clutches of the nazis in Alexandretta. Sure, it makes sense that he would not blend in (and that he has everything but the book stolen, etc.), but what about the nazis? Perhaps a group of nazi agents have the same problems, surrounded by begging natives, and when they finally push through the crowds and corner Marcus, they are in just as bad a position as he is.

It is important in an action film for the set-pieces to work, so I’ll quickly go over a couple of the ones that don’t:

The boat chase is rather James Bond-esque and generic, and takes place mostly in open water. Better if the boats were, say, gondolas, with small electric motors, and if Indy had to keep one turn ahead of the bad guys in the narrow canals of Venice, or be cut to ribbons by machine gun fire. The gondola poles could be put to good use, as could the many narrow, low bridges and open windows.

The visit to Berlin has no tension at all. It would be nice to see at least one German talk to or confront Indy at the rally, so that he has to then be rescued by Jones Snr. or Elsa.

The plane downed by seagulls was a nice idea, but wasn’t convincing in practice, because the plane would have started shooting well before the gulls were close enough to present a danger. If Jones Snr. had been further along the beach, hidden from the plane at first, so that the pilot (concentrating on Indy) didn’t notice him until too late, this would have been more effective.

The chase across the desert with the tank vs. Indy had very little tension. In fact, when I first saw this set-piece I was convinced that Steven Spielberg couldn’t have directed it. It was too poorly paced, unconvincing, and flat. I’d have made greater pains to remove the other vehicles from the equation earlier – they spent too much time not-doing-things, as did the copious number of guards, failing to stop Indy from stealing horses or riding right past everyone without being shot, or even shot at. It would have been nice to have Indy on foot against the tank. Say, it was bearing down on him, and he was hiding behind a rock that was getting progressively smaller as the tank blasted it, until it became apparent they were going to run him down with the treads, and there was nowhere he could run without being gunned down with the machine gun. Of course, he escapes by ducking to the side of the tread just as it runs over the rock, and clings to the bottom. As you do. Or that, rather than putting a rock into the mouth of the cannon, he pointed his revolver down the barrel and fired all the bullets directly down it. I would have definitely been convinced by the subsequent cannon misfire! Or that, when he is being dragged along the side between the wall and the tank, that he initially struggles to climb up, but gives up on that and struggles just to get free (he is being held there by a loop of strap) and drop down – if he is doing the latter, it doesn’t show it well. Perhaps he does get one end free, but the nazi sadistically secures the other end to keep him in place. And it would be nice if he were rescued by his own ingenuity rather than blind luck. If, for example, he had managed to fire another bullet down the barrel of the defunct cannon from which he was hanging – the cannon was pointing more or less away from the driver, so a (still) lucky shot (but lucky through his own efforts) might have hit the driver.
When Indy confronts the three traps, only the “leap of faith” one is actually any good. The first trap shouldn’t have had a vertical rotating blade, which would have caught a person “kneeling before the lord” anyway, and the second trap would have been very easy to test with a long stick or a couple of heavy rocks. I’d have fixed the second trap by having the “wrong letters” trigger spikes dropping from the ceiling – and not just above the wrong letter, either.

And finally, the set-piece with the holy grail was a little off. The bad guy was so convinced by Elsa’s pronunciation, he didn’t even get anyone else to test it first – such as Jones Snr, who he had specifically shot in order to get Indy to fetch the grail in the first place. I’d have had him wounded, perhaps by one of the earlier traps (the spike trap, for example). Perhaps he is forced to double-cross some of the nazis, killing them in order to be the first to drink from the grail (thus getting rid of some of the embarrassing surplus of live nazis standing around doing nothing at the end, when Indy goes back to his dad) – and that when he drank from even the wrong one, it healed him before aging him to dust.

It may sound that firstly, I am very picky, and secondly, I didn’t like the film. There are bits of humour and plot and characterisation and action that do work. I did enjoy the film overall, and there were moments that captured the magic of the Lost Ark that Temple of Doom entirely failed to do. The relationship between Indy and his father was very good, and the touch that his father was a pure academic and not comfortable with violence (or even swearing) was one of the running jokes that did work. Watching the film again has definitely mellowed me to its flaws. But I am glad they stopped making Indiana Jones films when they did. The idea of an Attack Of The Clones-era Indiana Jones film makes me shudder.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 27th, 2004 at 7:12 pm and is filed under Action, I, shellshear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.