Having yesterday tossed out a few reasons why Indy 4 is likely to fail, I’m going to go just a bit further now. Perhaps this is an exercise in expectation-lowering, and perhaps I’m just trying to prove that I can be coldly rational, but I herewith provide a quick guide to some of the major flaws I could think of from the previous three films in the series.
-When people accuse this film of being racist, they’re actually kind of right. White guys are heroes or supervillains; brown people are silly sidekicks or cannon fodder.
-The degradation of Karen Allen’s Marion Ravenwood, who is given one of the great character introductions in cinema history, drinking a huge Sherpa under the table in one long take, followed by a pair of scenes ending with the magnificent line “I’m your goddamn partner!” that set her up to be one of the toughest chicks in any movie ever. By the film’s end she’s become an exceptionally clever romantic interest, and a standard-issue damsel in distress, getting herself locked in an airplane, kidnapped twice by Nazis, and thrown into a snake pit in a frilly dress.
-As William Goldman mentions, Indy achieves virtually nothing in this film. He takes part in the hunt, we get melted Nazis and the Ark hidden in a warehouse. He doesn’t take part in the hunt, we get melted Nazis and the Ark lost on a Mediterranean island.
-There is some shaky matte work scattered throughout the picture, notably the thunderstorm when Indy’s team finds the Well of Souls and the climax with the open Ark.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
-Hey, Raiders? Temple of Doom will see your racism, and raise it.
-It’s usually rolled in with the film’s racist overtones, but I’d like to give the infamous dinner scene a place of pride all by its lonesome. It’s not just a problem because of the “furriners shore do eat weird things!” mentality, but also because it’s diabolically gross in a frankly childish way.
-Kate Capshaw as Willie Scott. Well, duh. I don’t tend to blame Capshaw for playing a shrieking, underwritten role as shrieking, but I don’t enjoy it either. True, there’s nothing in the character that isn’t there in the serials from the ’30s that inform the Indiana Jones films, but that’s not much of a defense.
-Spielberg really checks out of the film in the middle; from the moment we see enslaved children to the moment they are freed, as a matter of fact. His directing there is as slack as anything in his career nadir, The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
-Short Round (Ke Huy Quan), though no longer anywhere close to the most obnoxious child in a Spielberg film, certainly isn’t a tick in the movie’s favor.
-While the Ark and the Holy Grail are fairly straightforward MacGuffins, the mostly-invented mythology around the Sankara Stones isn’t, and could use some explication. When Indy says at the end, “I understand its power now,” that’s just swell. I deeply wish that I did, too.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
-The opening sequence. Where Raiders and Temple of Doom both used their first 12 minutes to ease into the story proper, in Last Crusade the opening seems completely unconnected from what follows, unless it’s the whole daddy issue. Instead, it feels a lot like a commercial for The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. It’s not even satisfying as an origin story: he got his whip, his hat, his scar and his fear of snakes all in the same afternoon? That’s convenient.
-“Ah, Venice.” Indy moves from being a quick-witted scoundrel to a quipster at least a few times in this movie, and I don’t care for it. It also augurs poorly for the new film.
-John Williams had officially moved from his “interesting and inventive” phase to his “I will never compose an original cue for the rest of my life” phase by 1989.
-The book-burning scene is, and I know this isn’t a party-line opinion, deeply unfortunate. The Indy movies aren’t about famous historical celebrities, except this one time, and using Adolf Hitler as a gag is…what’s that word?…right, “problematic as fuck.” When post-Schindler Spielberg talks about how guilty he feels for making Nazis cartoon villains in the Indy series, I tend to roll my eyes, but in this one case I think he’s completely right. Thank God he and Lucas decided not to include Riefenstahl as they originally planned, or this might be my least favorite scene in the director’s canon.
-Boy, that awesome ride out into the sunset sure feels a lot less awesome now that there’s another movie.