Indiana Jones

Put on your Fedora, dust off the leather jacket and crack your bull whip because Indiana Jones is back on the big screen after 19 years.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 27 years since Temple of Doom but Harrison Ford is back and kicking ass at a rather surprisingly sprightly 65 years young.

Set in the late 1950s of the Cold War era, the two-hour movie sees our swashbuckling archaeologist hero racing against Soviet agents to recover a mysterious pre-Colombian skull in the wilds of Peru.

Convinced this mysterious crystal skull holds the key to supernatural powers, a Russian scientist named Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) has made it her mission to take it back to the Motherland.

She kidnaps Jones's duplicitous mercenary colleague Mac (Ray Winstone) to help her find it, but while she makes off with a skull, Jones escapes her death squad - and a nuclear explosion! It's all Indy deja vu until we meet Mutt (Shia LaBeouf), a young man who has definitely seen Marlon Brando in The Wild One once too often.

Mutt needs Indy to help him find his father, Oxley (John Hurt), a scientist who found a skull and lost his mind. We can sense the connections, and by the time it's all confirmed with the reappearance of Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood - Indy's true love from Raiders of the Lost Ark – the plot is in full swing.

From there Spielberg opens the throttle and sends us hurtling towards the hugely entertaining yet predictable conclusion.

That is not to say that the movie is not without flaws because even excellent performances from Harrison and LaBeouf cannot hide a script struggling under the weight of its own movie heritage.

Missing also is the abundance of wise cracks and a genuine love interest of past Indiana Jones movies which is replaced instead with a reliance on nostalgic comedy and impressive special efforts. Also Spielberg’s inspiration for the ending is pure 1950’s B movies and is more ET than Indy.

However, dialogue and plot is not really why we are here so cue the snakes, monkeys, bullets, car chases, hostile native Indians and booby traps because that’s what we want and Spielberg is not afraid to give it too us.