A Marvelous Adventure, On Par with "Raiders," That Adds Depth to the Jones Family Mythos

Rating: 9/10 (1 May 2018)

After two successful big-budget starring vehicles, we finally get an origin story for Indiana Jones. Of course, that's largely to facilitate the addition of a new supporting character (Sean Connery in a wonderful casting as Indy's long lost father, who we'll get to in just a moment) but that extra layer of nostalgia, wrapped around a property that's deeply nostalgic in the first place, manages to avoid numerous pitfalls and serve as an effective prologue. River Phoenix performs especially well as the young Jones, expertly wearing Harrison Ford's mannerisms throughout the long callback, and somewhere along the way we get a worthwhile genesis for the grown-up version's affinity for leather jackets and fedoras.
Once the story jumps ahead to a more familiar era (if not precisely the present), it's full speed ahead on the hunt for the mythical holy grail, a lifelong obsession for the father and recent fixation of the third reich. Soon reunited, both Jones boys dance through precarious situations and near-misses in the history books, a full battalion of Nazi soldiers nipping at their heels, before drawing close to the prize. Ford and Connery are dynamic together, boiling down a complicated father-son relationship to a series of glares, grins and grunts. They alternate between bickering testily and slapping each other on the back in camaraderie, and I honestly can't say which makes for a more entertaining watch. There's depth, too, a stinging blend of long-simmering resentment and earnest care for one another, which often bubbles up just in time to enhance the plot's heaviest moments.
Naturally, it simply wouldn't be an Indiana Jones movie without big action sets (in which the series somehow manages to one-up itself yet again) or boatloads of witty retorts and punchy one-liners, and those two essential elements combine to give the film a loose, fun-loving quality without compromising any of the more serious moments. All this without going too far over the top, as we saw more than once in the mildly underwhelming Temple of Doom and borderline-disastrous Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It's well-written and purposeful, successfully intense and humorous, an in-the-wheelhouse serial-styled adventure that spans several continents before confronting superstition and cracking several dusty, life-threatening riddles on the path to a biblical treasure. Indy probably should've left well-enough alone, because this chapter is essentially impossible to top.