Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Rating: 6/10 (25 April 2009)

Indiana Jones is now on a search for the Holy Grail in the third slot of Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones' trilogy -- that is, until the terrible Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull came along. Suffice to say, the Holy Grail is not really the most important thing in this film. It is a pretext for a series of unlikely adventures and misadventures that includes an Arab cult, rats, a crusader's tomb, Nazis, secret passage ways, zepellins, a Pasha with a passion for automobiles, an unlikely battle with a tank, and a temple with boob-traps that could only have been put there by the all-mighty God, who (judging from the film) has a really dark sense of humor.
Now very little of this Indiana Jones movie makes sense. For example, would the British really allow Nazi soldiers to march about freely in Egypt (which was then a British colony)? Probably not. But in director Spielberg's film, the Nazis roam about Egypt like they own the place. But that's not the part of the film that I object to. We already grown accustomed to this idea that "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" is not a serious adventure film.
The problem with this movie is that it has too many action scenes and the overwhelming majority of them are boring. I am tired of watching chases. I am tired of the explosions. I am tired of pointless machine gun battles. I am tired of watching Indiana Jones best a German tank. And yes, I am tired of seeing Nazis being reduced to two-dimensional characters whose only purpose in life is the be evil bastards (which unfortunately is what Spielberg does all too often in his films). To his credit, Spielberg tries to make the action scenes more interesting by having Indiana Jones' father (played capably by Sean Connery) make fun of some of the action scenes. "This is not archaeology," he tells Indiana. But such humor only goes so far and the temptation is to skip through the action sequences as quickly as possible.
Where Spielberg does succeed is in creating truly exotic sequences. I will not spoil anything, but suffice to say there is a sense of wonder when Indiana Jones walks though a chamber with artifacts or an old ruin. If Spielberg focused more of his attention on that, instead of the shootouts, the explosions and the silly chases, then he probably would have ended up creating a better picture.