Disappointing

Rating: 5/10 (5 January 2013)

This film is high on my list of "Movies I Was Looking Forward To, But Found Disappointing."
The first half-hour, focusing on Christopher Plummer as Rudyard Kipling, feels like something to be endured. The second half-hour, the trek of Daniel and Peachy, reaches for an epic feeling, gets close, but lacks depth, lacks any sense of spiritual struggle by these men to get to their destination. (It's possible that this lack of spiritual struggle is a deliberate choice by the writers, i.e., the two men struggle physically but not spiritually, they do not grow, and this is the core reason for their later problems. Still, the trek needs more juicy danger and less fake snow.)
Sean Connery, whose work I generally like, seems not well-suited to the broad, blarney-filled character of Daniel. He's trying too hard. He's far better at relaxed elegance. Saeed Jaffrey as Billy Fish is one-dimensional; the actor is talented but the role is pinched and thus is irritating at times. That said, Jaffrey's last moment is absolutely superb.
Michael Caine is perfect as Peachy - exactly the right tone.
The film's physical settings are mostly uninspired. The terrain, when they finally arrive at their destination, is ordinary, even a bit dry and dull, when we want gorgeous.
The room full of treasure exemplifies for me one of the film's problems. The room has no magic to it whatsoever, it's just a pedestrian room full of not-very-gleaming gold, and un-cut big rubies that don't say "big rubies" so much as they say "boring rocks." Huston decides with this treasure room to emphasize stark historical realism, to make us aware of the fact that rubies were probably not cut to gleaming perfection in the day of Alexander the Great. Huston thus abjures magic and fantasy. This is a mistake. We want magic and fantasy. They are fundamental to how we think of history, deep-down.
Huston's basic problem, which he never resolves, is, how do I treat history? What is my conception of the past? Do I want to make a fun historical fantasy or do I want to make something real, something with the gritty, stark feeling of historical reality to it, as in my earlier project "The Red Badge of Courage"? Or....can I perform a miracle and stitch together the two genres?
"Raiders of the Lost Ark," six years after "The Man Who Would Be King," achieves the miracle that Huston probably thought he could achieve. "Raiders" recognizes that if a history film receives a light seasoning of magic, if the director makes a significant-but-not-heavy-handed commitment to glittering fantasy, the project can click nicely, can bring to the surface our unconscious fantasies about the past - that it's a place of magic and mystery. (I'm not saying the past is actually magical. I'm saying that's how we feel about it, deep-down.)
Connery's last shot is good. The crowd scenes are consistently good, especially one shot where Huston, years before CGI, seems to have a couple of thousand people, actual humans, trudging along, forming an army.