Great original - bad sequel

Rating: Null/10 (6 August 2000)

Spoilers!
There's always #4 to look forward to. As for this one, Raiders II, it should be - after Indy and Marion found the Ark of the Covenant, with the fire shooting, and the exploding Bellocs, and the tornado of ashes splitting the clouds, and . . .
Gee - whatever happened to the Ark? If this is a sequel, and not another 'prequel', what the heck . . happened? That's what's so startling. The answer is - nothing. It's just a new adventure. Even the old serials picked up from the last episode. Indy hasn't been affected. Nothing changed in his character, except that he's now sillier. It makes him seem almost . . insane. Never mind that the writers have taken to denigrating his character with 'we named the dog, Indiana', and whatever else.
Apart from that, there are other problems. The music isn't quite as inspiring as with the original. It's just kind of flat. That's hard to explain, since the original film depended so much on the score. Also, there's no follow-on from the previous characters. It's nice that Rhys-Davies and Elliot return, but they now play their characters almost as buffoons - Elliot almost like a small, foolish child (the pen is mightier .. strikingly different that the much more self-possessed and intelligent man in the original film).
The quest, of course, isn't really for the Grail, the supernatural superweapon in the wrong hands (not explained why). It's for Dad. But even this is played for yucks. They're in no real sense of danger. The Nazis that imprison them are little more than Keystone Cops. The flaming room never is any real problem, in which the idiot Nazis all seem to get trapped. They should have put big red noses on these guys, and maybe on all the protagonists, as well (Connery is no James Bond, here). It's very different from the much more serious gloss you had in the original, the true sense of adventure - where you had the sense these Nazis were really torturers, were really killers, were really Nazis, and where Indy was perpetually being beaten and dragged and hit and whatever else - in this film, he just kinda skates. In the first film, he was courageous and resourceful. In this one he seems to be reading from a script.
The thing with the Grail, too, just doesn't fly. This is supposed to be a magical cup that the Nazis will use for world domination - like the Ark, the monstro laser beam, if you will. That's how it's stated at one point in the film. The Grail can't fall into the Nazi's hands. But when we see it treated basically as little more than a home remedy for gunshot wound, despite all the 'she never really believed in the grail', fact is, nobody in this film really believes in the Grail. This is very different from the first film. It's an afterthought. It's nothing like the Ark - in the myth of these films, anyway. The Grail is sort of like that golden idol in the opening scene of the first Raiders movie. It's not like the Ark.
Maybe it's the search for Dad, that throws things off. Try that with the Ark story, and it would have been very different, and prob. not very well remembered. Maybe it's that Connery plays it for laughs, and so does Ford. That's really a darned shame. The first movie had its light moments. But the characters weren't dumbed down to get the laughs. Maybe it's that there aren't really the bad guys, here, but just goofs. Good guys are clowns, bad guys are clowns, and the guardian of the Grail can't even hold onto his sword. Maybe it's because Indy's character hasn't developed or changed, particularly after seeing what he did of the Ark on that island.
When they go back to Berlin for the diary, cause Dad can't even remember one of the most important things he wrote (not to mention Indy, who reads the diary on the plane but apparently misses the infamous map - pointed out to him by Brody over a coffee table), they get sort of lost in the crush of adoring fanatics for Der Fuhrer. I think that was sort of the theme of the whole movie - it was just kind of lost in what remained of the Raiders myth, trying to dust the thing off, repair the damage of time, and hope one could go home again to the same kind of movie, finding instead that it's easy to just simply get lost.