I've been collecting a few Indiana Jones reviews from the Internets, both pro and con, to complement my own. The House Next Door's Keith Uhlich really dug it, as did Matt Zoller Seitz. But Cynical-C had an even stronger negative reaction than I did, titling his review Kingdom of the Crystal SUCK, and Jason Bellamy at The Cooler goes still deeper, dissecting the movie's failings beat by beat. Here's Bellamy:
That saddest part of all, though, is that this movie is entirely without romance. Oh, sure, Karen Allen is back as Marion Ravenwood, so there’s a love story of sorts. But the original trilogy’s yearning to turn over rocks and explore the hidden worlds underneath has been replaced by a retrospective fondness for the time when it was fun to turn over rocks, and that’s not the same thing. If The Last Crusade is evidence of just how much Spielberg cared about the legend of Indiana Jones, Crystal Skull is a love letter that he and Lucas wrote to themselves. It’s a celebration of adventures past (not all of them from the Indiana Jones series, by the way) rather than an advancement of the saga. Thus, it fittingly plays like a high school reunion, with folks sucking in their guts and mistakenly providing evidence of their rapidly eroding vision by telling themselves that they’re just as vital as they used to be.The further I get from the afterglow of seeing the movie on opening night, the more I think Bellamy's right.
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