The fedora is there.
And for sure, there’s Harrison Ford beneath the fedora.
Yes, Steven Spielberg is there again - calling the shots behind the camera as director, as he was for the previous three Indiana Jones movies.
But the magic just ain’t there in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which comes nearly two decades after the previous movie in the series.
Made on a lavish $195 million budget (excluding the mega-marketing budget), the latest instalment of the Indiana Jones series is a rollercoaster ride without a coherent, gripping story to tie it all together in a pleasing package.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull reminds us of the ugly Bollywood movies where a coherent story is often an afterthought, if at all.
Just as our Bollywood directors bamboozle us with skimpily-clad heroines, foreign locales and silly songs in lieu of a story, in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Steven Spielberg tries in vain to bedazzle us with treks through thick jungles teeming with big snakes, shrieking monkeys and scary red ants, slides down high waterfalls, moving columns of stones and fast car chases along steep mountain roads in illusory hopes that we’ll come along for the wild ride.
But a jolly good ride, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull certainly is not.
In the absence of a gripping story, the dialogs sound banal, the action scenes seem disjointed, contrived and tiresome after a while, and the overall effect is one of Continue Reading…