Free Lobotomy with Movie Stub

Holy crap on stick, the new Indiana Jones movie is awful. The Major says it’s not as good as 1 or 3 but better than 2. I say it’s the worst of the lot.

Cate Blanchet and her Hair Piece of Doom are absolutely ridiculous as the ‘bad guy.’ If you can ignore the fact that she’s some super secret Soviet psychic spy (who can’t even read Indy’s mind), you probably will be able to get past the fact that her ‘accent’ is all sorts of wrong. Sometimes she sounds like a Russian, sometimes she sounds British, the rest of the time she sounds like a Briton trying to speak with a Russian accent. At any rate, we’ve seen the template for this villain before – and it was done much better in The Last Crusade.

I’m not going to bore everyone with a detailed break-down of archaeological and historical problems with the movie, but NOTE to Speilberg: The Maya lived in Mexico and Central America, the Inca lived in Peru. The people that lived in Amazon were not Inca and they certainly didn’t speak any dialect of Maya. And they also weren’t known to build temples, and most definitely not temples that look like Chichen Itza got dropped into the rain forest.

There’s not much of a plot, and what there is isn’t very compelling. They’ve also seemed to do away with any and all real world physics. Surviving a nuclear blast in a lead-lined fridge that gets rocket launched across half of Nevada. Really? Didn’t Punky Brewster have a special about killer fridges? Super magnetic items (made from non-magnetic material) that are selectively magnetic and attract other non-magnetic metals? WTF? Is that you Mo-Dean, inter dimensional outer space being? As an added bonus we’ve got really pissed off BulletAnt-ArmyAnt hybrids attacking and a car chase that looked lifted from the chase scene on Endor – I was seriously expecting Ewoks to pop up singing “yub-yub” while slinging rocks at things. Finally, the last time I checked a constrictor snake of any stripe is not going to take well to being used as a rope.

There’s only so much good actors can do with a crappy script and premise. This movie had the potential be so much more … all the elements are there. But it seems someone left this in the blender on puree for way too long. Indy 4 is a real lemon of a movie, and there’s no lemonade to be made from this very, very bad thing.