As good as the first two

Rating: 9/10 (25 May 2008)

The Last Crusade is the Indiana Jones film I've seen least. In fact, I may be lying if I were to say I've seen it more than once all the way through before this viewing. Having watched all three of the original trilogy last week, I have to say, there isn't a great gap between them in quality. They're all three excellent movies with brilliant direction by Spielberg, and pitch-perfect action sequences, paced just so as not to overwhelm the viewer. The Last Crusade is the most comic of the three films, adding Sean Connery as Indy's father and pairing the two as a kind of Abbot and Costello team. It's shocking just how well it works  if I hadn't seen the movie and you told me Harrison Ford and Sean Connery would be the perfect comic duo, I'd have been more than a little dubious. Connery isn't known for his comic chops, but, if he didn't have them before, he definitely earned them here. I think, after James Bond (and I'd say unfortunately so), his Henry Jones Sr. will prove to be his most remembered performance. Denholm Elliot and John Rhys-Davies both return from Raiders, and both are more comic characters this time around (Elliot in particular is hilarious; I think Sallah is kind of wasted in this one). Alison Doody plays Indy's double-crossing love interest. I had remembered her as being particularly forgettable, but this time around I thought she was quite good. I still have to wonder what happened to Karen Allen (which is kind of explained in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), who was by far the best of the Indy girls, but Doody is good at what she does. River Phoenix appears in the brilliant opening sequence as young Indiana Jones. What a sad waste his death was.