Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

For the most part, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is hugely entertaining. It features a ton of cool stunts, most of which we've seen before, but none of which will fail to keep the audience engaged with the film. It's very easy to accept the movie's simplistic, often loopy, approach to things because we realize that it's an Indiana Jones movie and that something would actually be wrong if the whole affair felt even slightly more complex or serious.

When there's about an hour left on the film, things seem to be on their way to making this turn out to be a really solid piece of fun summer movie fare. There are a lot of pretty intense stunts (particularly a very good one involving a motor vehicle chase through the jungle) that all seem to be leading up to a high-energy climax. Instead, all of a sudden, these seemingly conclusive stunts which pit the good guys against the bad guys end, and we're left with our group of heroes faced with the task of returning the crystal skull, and it is here, when there are still about 30 minutes left (in what is definitely an overlong movie) that the flame goes out, thus leaving us with a shockingly underwhelming conclusion. Even when the lead villain (played by Cate Blanchett) re-emerges when there are about 10 minutes left, she doesn't show up to do much, and hence we don't get a satisfying payoff at the end at all.

The large amount of entertaining action sequences during the movie's first three quarters, coupled with the fact that Shia Labeouf looks incredibly hot in the outfit he wears throughout the film, make this a pretty worthy film that ultimately loses steam at the end. If I'd been on the editing crew, I would've definitely chopped off a lot of the stuff in the last half hour, so as to ensure that the movie ended leaving its viewers with an adrenaline high rather than in a state of restlessness.

5/10