cartoon for grownups?

Rating: 6/10 (9 June 1999)

Everyone else seems to love this movie, so I guess I have to be the one to 'dis' it. I really don't understand why it is so popular. I really enjoy a good adventure, but I like it to be more than a quarter inch deep.
It was so continuously noisy that I had to turn the volume down. The music was bombastic and grating. People die like flies. The protagonists gaily wreak havoc with no apologies. There is no psychology or character. The hero is brave - a cheap virtue since he's obviously invulnerable. The cultural icons dragged in to lend an exotic tone were given the most superficial treatment - everything was a throwaway, but none of it was stylish, witty or funny. We are talking about a cartoon - except lots of cartoons are more sophisticated and better developed.
I can see that the idea is to evoke a golden age of imperialism where we are excused from the duty to care about history, culture and religion, or to feel bad about archaeological piracy, mass murder, ethnic stereotypes, shoddy scholarship, etc. etc. and can just have some good clean fun. But with all this freedom, what is the fun? Knocking over piles of blocks like a three-year-old and punching the bad guy in the nose.
The movie is a pastiche - almost every scene is borrowed. The cultural vein of nostalgia that is being mined is old -obsolete - adventure fiction. If we could see most of this fiction now we would probably find it childish and dated - we know more about the world now. The trick is to make us forget that so we can enjoy our nostalgia.
Do people really need permission to regress this badly?