cynical cash-in of the worst variety

Rating: 1/10 (1 July 2007)

Messy, even ridiculous, tribute to the James Bond films of the 1960s, and a disastrous finale to the original Indiana Jones series.
Like the locations, the plot is all over the map. Well, sure adventure films should travel the globe easily - but there ought to be a reason for it. The clues leading to the final discovery really have nothing to do with one another, are forced into patterns that really make no sense, and are simply used as excuses to drag the characters from England to Germany to Italy to Egypt - well, eventually, we loose track of just where.
Ford and Connery ham it up something fierce. The sets look like sets. The cinematography is second rate. The editing is competent and not much else. Spielberg seems to have fallen asleep in the director's chair quite a bit ("uh, are we making a movie? why didn't you wake me up?") The ending: pseudo-Christian pseudo-Mystical blather, not at all in keeping with any Christian mythos or morality, and dependent on B-movie puzzle solving, pratfalls, and cliff-hanging that utterly debase the mythic references to cheap rumors about possible gods.
This is cynical cash-in of the worst variety; stay away.