The Citizen

Last summer I was all too happy to skip “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” Between its introduction of extraterrestrials to the adventure series' canon and its inclusion of Shia LaBeouf as a greaser tough in the cast (also heir apparent to Harrison Ford's fedora), I just pretended “Indiana Jones” was still a trilogy as of today.

Then I watched an episode of “South Park” that hilariously depicts “Crystal Skull” as a two-hour-plus-long rape scene of the Indiana Jones character at the profiteering hands of creators George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Thinking it couldn't possibly be that bad, I finally acknowledged the fourth - and probably not final - chapter of “Indiana Jones” by watching it in Blu-ray last week.

And did I ever think wrong. “Crystal Skull” really was that traumatically, head-scratchingly bad. There's its hammy introduction of '50s cultural shorthand, such as Indy's declaration that “I like Ike” and LeBeouf's whole character and the greaser/soc mob fight he instigates. There are its annoyingly wide gaps in believability, between the normally wise Indy's trust of his quadruple-crossing partner Mac (Ray Winstone), the uninteresting extraterrestrial hoopla and Indy's use of a freaking refrigerator to survive an atomic blast at a nuclear test site he sort of wanders onto. And then there's Cate Blanchett's Russian accent.

But what really bothered me about “Crystal Skull” was Ford, who appears less charismatic than ever as the aging archeologist. Granted, for Ford, even low charisma can make him more appealing than an entire supporting cast. But in the role that made him famous (along with that of Han Solo in the “Star Wars” films), Ford felt flat. And as “South Park” suggested, he may indeed have been metaphorically flat on his back.