The defining fact about 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is that it isn't Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. On its own, this fact is hardly distinctive. Many, if not indeed most, movies are not Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The key difference is that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the only movie I know that is specifically repudiating Temple of Doom, which was a big ol' moneymaker in 1984, as the first sequel to the 1981 megablockbuster Raiders of the Lost Ark was always bound to be. But it was also controversial for its extreme violence (famously, it was the immediate cause for the creation of the PG-13 rating in the United States), and divisive among the series' fans - and its creators, I rather expect. Director Steven Spielberg has always made it very clear that he's the custodian of the Indiana Jones pictures, not their primary author, always making it clear that they're "George Lucas's thing", and in that capacity I don't know that he's ever actually spoken out against the second movie in the series; he's too loyal for that kind of thing. But just from the evidence of the movie itself, I think you can tell that the director of Temple of Doom really didn't like what he was making, and I suspect he himself was as happy as anybody for Last Crusade to be "specifically not that".

And so it is, specifically, not that. Even more specifically, it's a retrenchment to Raiders of the Lost Ark, replicating the basic narrative structure (including approximately equivalent setpieces at approximately the same spot in the script), bringing back pre-WWII Nazis as the villains, and featuring as its central macguffin a major lost artifact from Judeo-Christian lore rather than the vague and under-researched "we think this might be something sort of from Hinduism" relics at the centerpiece of Temple of Doom. It mostly takes place in a desert country bordering the Mediterranean. This is all, to be fair, subordinate to an absolute whale of a high concept, brand new to Last Crusdae: Indiana Jones needs to rescue his dad, who is James Bond. But the point is extremely clear: if you liked the first movie and didn't like the second, they made the third one to apologise to you.

I think there are two basic responses one can have to all of this: "It's just like Raiders, and I liked Raiders, so I like this" versus "It's just like Raiders, and I liked Raiders, so I'd frankly rather just rewatch Raiders, and be a little grumpy that they didn't try something new again". I am now and have been since a very young age the second type of person, and I'll go ever farther in saying that I'm actually also a pretty big fan of Temple of Doom, and then I'll go all the way into pure chaotic madness by saying that I actually prefer Temple of Doom to Last Crusade, so you're welcome to ignore all the things I have to say about anything ever again. But setting aside all of that, there's absolutely no disputing that Last Crusade is still an awfully good and deliciously watchable popcorn movie, made by probably the single most reliable director of popcorn movies in the history of American cinema, when he was still pretty close to the peak of his powers. Not, I think, at the peak. Spielberg in 1981 was broadly in the midst of maybe the single greatest runs of popular entertainments ever produced by a single director (Jaws in 1975, Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial in 1982), but he was also specifically coming off of his first outright fiasco, 1979's 1941. So he was hungry to prove himself, and had all the necessary talent to prove it. Spielberg in 1984 was still glowing from the incredible success of that 1975-1982 run, and also starting to wonder what kind of artist he was, and if nothing else, Temple of Doom was undoubtedly a challenge to make. Spielberg in 1989, in contrast to the above two Spielbergs, had very obviously started to lose interest in being Hollywood's premiere crafter of immaculate pop art: in the five years between Indiana Jones pictures, he'd directed The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun, and he was gearing up to make his other 1989 film (the first year with two Spielberg releases, in fact), Always. Indeed, I'd say that none of his "pure" popcorn movies after 1982 have the extravagant perfection in their craftsmanship as those four masterpieces around the turn of the decade, and every time he's returned to this mode in the intervening three-decades-and-change, it's with a certain stiffness and uncertainty, a distinct level of having to re-learn how to make those impeccable choices. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, as the first film of this new era of Spielberg, is the one where he had the least amount to re-learn, and you can see the stiffness the least.

So off-peak Spielberg, but only slightly off-peak, and few peaks were ever higher. What this means in the act of watching the movie is that the concluding 50 minutes (it runs 121 in total, before the credits) are some of the best big-ass popcorn moviemaking of the 1980s, and that is a decade that had an extraordinarily high success rate for big-ass popcorn movies - there were fewer of them, so they each had to count for more (in fact, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was part of the fabled summer of 1989, which is when that started to shift, with its overwhelming slate of big sequels and other major tentpoles. Many films died that summer, but not Last Crusade; it was the year's #2 film, behind only the undeniable force that was the first Batman). The main setpiece in the film's second half is, by itself, a strong candidate for the honor being the decade's best action-adventure sequence outside of Raiders of the Lost Ark itself: the lengthy tank chase, which is objectively just a retread (pardon the expression) of the truck chase from the first movie, but adds enough wrinkles and new conceits to feel like a wholly new thing. It's especially good at switching between multiple lines of action, inside and outside of multiple tanks, with Spielberg's irreplaceable editor Michael Kahn finding a beautiful rhythm as he switches from one space to another, letting the sense of speed control his handling of the scene but also finding perfect little beats to use as transitions, so that it feels like the action is escalating between cuts, not just within shots. And in the middle of a very strong score overall, the equally irreplaceable John Williams is probably up to his most important structural work here, controlling the pace and rising tension of the scene through his thumping, martial music.

That's probably the film's highlight, both in terms of action and pure craftsmanship, but there's very little in the long last chunk of the film that I don't think works. It as a nice variety: besides the grinding tension of the tank scene, there's a much fluffier, pseudo-comic action setpiece involving planes, and a bouncy Williams theme that is my favorite of this film's score; there's a fantastic temple traps thriller sequence that's pretty distinctly the most "fun" thing here, in part because the filmmakers openly treat their sacred temple to the gravest artifact in all of Christendom as a carnival haunted house, and not even a terribly high-class one, to judge from the unmotivated "eerie" light pointing up at those curtain-like waterfalls of spiderwebs. At the same time, the director is treating it with precision and care, making the sense of mystery and danger surrounding all of this nonsense feel unexpectedly legitimate. I can come up with one substantive complaint about any of this: I think the temple is overlit, the one time in three Indiana Jones movies that cinematographer Douglas Slocombe made a choice that I don't think is self-evidently the right one. And it's not even just a nitpick, given the importance of these sequence in the overall plot, but it's hardly film-breaking; also, in general, '80s action films had a problem with overlighting ostensibly gloomy cavernous spaces, so it's by no means a sin unique to this one film.

So, the last 50 minutes, great stuff, fully on par with the best of the series. The problem is, and this is where I'm going make some people very sad with me, I think the opening 71 minutes are a lot less consistent. I think, in fact, that parts of those 71 minutes are actually bad, which is neither fun to say about an Indiana Jones film nor a Spielberg film of this vintage (he was on the verge of a decade where "actually bad" things would start becoming more common, sorry to say). The film's big selling point, from 1989 to the present day, is that Harrison Ford's earnest but sly Indiana Jones, swashbuckling archaeologist, would no have to go head-to-head with his haughty bookworm dad, Henry Jones, Sr., played by no less a carved-in-granite icon than Sean Connery (there's the famous story that Spielberg was telling George Lucas, one day in the '70s, that he wanted to direct a James Bond picture, to which Lucas responded that he had an idea for something better than Bond, and Indy was the result; there has, as such, always been an unmistakable charm that the figurative father of Indiana Jones would be called in to play the literal father of Indiana Jones). This was self-evidently the material that got Spielberg the most excited - finally, an Indiana Jones picture about the fraught relationship between a demanding, unavailable father an an overachieving son! - and it's pretty much the first thing anybody talks about when they bring this movie up, and I agree: Connery and Ford are complete movie-movie bliss as a bickering odd couple, with Connery's peremptory smugness fitting the character like a glove, and his own irritability providing a real challenge to Ford's notorious prickliness. I am tempted to say that, throughout the running time of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, there's not a single scene predicated on any exchange of dialogue between the two actors that doesn't work - and generally, they work very well. The issue is that Sean Connery shows up in the 47th minute of the movie. And I won't say that nothing in those first 46 minutes works; I will, however, say that a shockingly small amount of it does.

A big part of the problem is that Last Crusade is much more invested in light comedy than any other film in the series, with (among other things) a largely comic, flippant series of scenes in Venice, Ford looking agog at various pratfalls, and the adjustment of supporting character Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) from reserved, thoughtful historian to flailing idiot buffoon - a change that does not merely happen between Raiders and Last Crusade, it actually happens in Last Crusade itself. And the thing about all of this comedy is that Spielberg is absolutely garbage at staging comedy. 1941 was a disaster on that front, but even in his good films, he tends to have more cuteness or warm mirth than actually good jokes. It is his one unambiguous shortcoming as a director. And this is trying very hard, for much of its running time, to be funny. It's almost never successful. Outside of the blithe Ford/Connery banter (which is probably more towards that "mirth" I was just talking about, though some bits are obvious laugh-lines), I think only two jokes actually land: the ironic juxtaposition of Indiana's serious monologue about Marcus with our first glimpse of Marcus as a dopey clown, and the bit where Indiana, disguised as an airship officer, explains to a terrified crowd that the Nazi he just threw out a window had "no ticket". Otherwise, I frankly find the film's attempts to be lighthearted somewhat facile and tedious.

And there are other problems in that first longer part. The film opens a prologue set in 1912, where young Indiana Jones (River Phoenix) reveals himself to us as a passionate young hothead even then, while we see the detachment between father and son for the first time. It is, on the one hand, very much from the mind of the same George Lucas who was soon to start giving us Star Wars prequels: it's an old complaint of mine, but having Indy receive (in this order): a lifelong fear of snakes, a bullwhip, a distinctive scar on the chin, and a beat-up brown fedora all in one afternoon - all in about a seven-minute span, for the first three - is the most pandering bullshit, exactly the same "shrink the universe down until its the size of a pebble" instinct that gave us young Darth Vader inventing C-3PO in The Phantom Menace or Yoda being good buddies with Chewbacca in Revenge of the Sith. And on the other hand, all respect to the honored dead, I don't think Phoenix is very good: the thing about Ford's Indy is that he's super charismatic and charming, while also being a bumbling nerdy fuck-up who mostly only succeeds in these movies by random chance and accident. Phoenix's Indy is none of these things - I suppose some people may find him charismatic, but I think there's too much bottled-up frustration at an unfair world living inside his performance to match what Ford is up to here, or has been up to in the preceding two movies.

It's also just not paced or structured all that well - setting aside everything else, wasting 47 minutes until we get to the actual movie just feels too baggy. The script for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is formally credited to Jeffrey Boam, whose career doesn't have really much else of real note, but it was extensively punched up by Tom Stoppard, whose career has many, many things of real note. Stoppard's job was mostly to punch up the relationship between the Doctors Jones, and this is probably why the humor there works better than elsewhere in the film; he also made a couple of changes to the structure, all of them for the best, but only a couple in the first hour. So if it feels like there are two scripts glued together here: there kind of are. And that first script is just a bit odd and ramshackle, dawdling on scenes that aren't working (given how graceful and atmospheric the expositions scenes about the Ark of the Covenant were in Raiders, it's quite visible and annoying how lumpy the exposition is here around the Holy Grail, which I'd say is a much simpler thing to explain to American audiences). During the Venice sequence especially it seems like the film is just hopping across plot points without explaining them at all: there's a bit solving a puzzle inside an old library that used to be an older church, and while we get an incredibly good crane shot out of the deal (maybe the best single shot in the whole movie, definitely the best shot in the first 46 minutes), I have never, in all the times that I've watched this film, understood why the numbers actually matter.

I am potentially being hard on the first hour: there's a very good storm sequence and a perfectly fine ship chase sequence (though I think it's the weakest vehicular chase scene in any of the '80s Indiana Jones movies), and, crucially, you can tell that Harrison Ford actually likes playing Indy, just as clearly as you could always tell that he did not like playing Han Solo. And while his performance takes a pretty big step up in quality once he gets Connery to play against, he's still doing pretty good with very little support prior to that, even managing to flirt hard enough with the film's bland female lead, Allison Doody (whose main acting choice is a cartoon German accent) to sell the alleged chemistry between them - something he wasn't as good at in Temple of Doom, I'll admit. And even though I think Spielberg is letting himself coast sometimes (this has, to me, by far the fewest "wow I loved that" compositions and moments of ingenious visual storyelling of any of the four Spielberg Indy films, and yes, I said "four"), he was still Steven Spielberg in the '80s, and there is a level of populist magnificence that he just had, even when he wasn't trying to prove he had it. At its laziest and least effective, this is still an exceptionally good example of frothy, bubbly popcorn movie magic, and with all my reservations, this still has to be one of the three or four best summer blockbusters of the second half of the 1980s

Reviews in this series
Raiders of the Lost Ark (Spielberg, 1981)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Spielberg, 1984)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Spielberg, 1989)
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Spielberg, 2008)
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Mangold, 2023)