DVD Review: The Men Who Stare At Goats

Underrated, melancholy psychic spy comedy arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray this week.

From the perspective of our post-ironic, cynical-for-hipness’ sake zeitgeist, the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, which embraced New Age mysticism and vague iterations of Eastern philosophy, seem a little naive and self-indulgent. That’s neither a completely unfair nor inaccurate assessment. Still, before shopping malls sold ankh medallions and Tao t-shirts, millions of Americans spent years looking for something vaster and more powerful inside themselves and the universe around them, sometimes taking strange paths to get there.

To hear the smart, well thought-out The Men Who Stare At Goats tell it, even the U.S. Army got in on the act, devoting years of research and funding towards building a “New Earth Army” of psychic spies and supersoldiers that could accomplish any number of mystical feats. Based on British journalist Jon Ronson’s 2004 account of the First Earth Battalion’s long and flawed history and directed by Grant Heslov, the film cruises with a zany comic momentum interspersed with flashbacks explaining the Battalion’s sad, doomed history. It’s chiefly a road movie in the desert, starring America’s leading man George Clooney as a Battalion veteran and Ewan McGregor as the hapless, cuckolded reporter following him in hopes of a story as well as other things he seems at a loss to pinpoint.

Clooney plays Lyn Cassady, once the star pupil of Battalion founder Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), a Vietnam veteran who went to investigate the counterculture on behalf of the Army and came back a convert to all its trippy teachings. Cassady was a “Jedi Warrior,” he tells reporter Bob Wilton (McGregor), one of a vanguard of soldiers who would conduct war by embracing peace. The two meet in Kuwait, as Cassady prepares to embark on a “secret” mission into the Iraqi desert. Wilton follows, becoming both straight man, witness, and eventual disciple of Cassady’s eccentric behavior.

The road they follow is tough: the two are kidnapped, blown up, rescued by a trigger-happy American security company, and eventually brought to the base camp for the Army’s current version of psychological warfare. This modern program involves subliminal messages put into music for our own soldiers and torturing detainees with the theme song to Barney the Dinosaur. The camp is directed, it turns out, by fellow New Earth Army veteran Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey), who years before had selfishly put the whole project on the path to ruin. Django is also present, albeit a drunken and weary version of his former self. As Cassady endures a crisis of faith in his life’s work, Wilton and Django set about “liberating” the camp using huge amounts of LSD.

The film works best when its manic comic momentum carries it forward, effortlessly moving between Cassady’s desert roamings to the Battalion’s salad days and back again. There’s a third-act twist into some potentially dark territory that thankfully never quite materializes, while the final resolution comes across a bit pat and a little too easy. Everything that happens therein is funny enough, as far as drug humor goes, especially involving Spacey’s climactic act of confrontation. As a running gag, telling McGregor – who possibly wishes we’d all forget his participation in the Star Wars prequels – about Jedi warriors is funny in a meta kind of way the first ten times the script does it. After that the laugh factor starts to wane.

But anyone expecting a point to the movie, or a theme, shouldn’t look to the plot but instead to the performances, Clooney’s and Bridges’ in particular. McGregor is a capable straight man to them both, but the two actors inject a feeling both of loss and regret into their roles, playing men who devoted their life to something that may actually have been hogwash all along. Cassady carries a bad secret around with him, and Django has let his faith collapse into despair. It’s tempting, but maybe a little simplistic, to see the present-day Django as Bridges’ beloved Dude Lebowski after eight years of war and terror: nervous, tired, aching for a vanished serenity. He’s not abiding so well after all.

Likewise, Clooney gives his best performance since Syriana in a film that bookends his 1999 Desert Storm adventure Three Kings. Apparently borrowing Dennis Farina’s moustache and stripped down physically to not much more than leathery skin and sad eyes, Cassady is a dying shell of a man whose true motivations for going into the desert are less enlightened than he wants Wilton to believe. What’s left of Cassady, like Django, is a relic of a more optimistic time, and Clooney expresses this with half-completed sentences, almost adolescent self-righteousness, and a patience with Wilton that borders on condescension. Faced with death and despair, his leap of faith towards Django and their lost, futile ambitions becomes a defiance to a world that’s left them both behind.

At least, that’s one interpretation. The obvious symbolism here is of a holy man wandering the desert looking for his teacher, the desert in this case being a combat zone filled with shoot-first countrymen and Iraqi criminals bent on kidnapping. Yet the film’s biggest weakness lies in not bringing those ideas to the surface or fleshing them out as much as they deserve. Heslov moves the script along, possibly too fast to explore the issues raised by those central performances, with a result that’s not everything it could be. That’s a shame. A film that took a closer look at such ideas in a modern American setting would really be something to stare at.

- Michael Kabel

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Note: A previous version of this review originally appeared for the film’s theatrical release.

Nuclear Winter

Ride out the dregs of late winter with three Cold War milestones.

Movie audiences of roughly a half-century ago had a wildly popular, intensely topical genre whose basis probably no one in the world today would bring back if they could: the Cold War/nuclear war thriller. Reaching its peak shortly before the United States’ mid-1960s escalation of the Vietnam War, these deliberately polemical suspensers and melodramas often took the form of “what-if” scenarios that played on the era’s literal worst fears and taking their stories down to the most heart wrenching - and heart-stopping – conclusions. And unlike the B-movies that form the crux of modern socially conscious film, they did so with A-list casts that included some of Hollywood’s most distinguished screen performers and behind the camera talent.

The following three films were all of that insane, determined era “on the brink” of the end of civilization, and each one is available on DVD. We recommend seeing them all, but probably not in a row, for your own sake.

Seven Days In May (1964): After the president (Fredric March) signs a sweeping disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, the politically ambitious Air Force general James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster) leads a cabal of officers, Congressmen, and media personalities in a planned coup d’etat disguised as ordinary military maneuvers. The  president is weak, they argue in a weirdly prescient echo of modern flak, and deserves impeachment rather than jeopardizing the nation with trust in an implacable foe. General Scott, by comparison, is a “real American” war hero and ideologue, accepting nominations and accolades like a modern Caesar. Opposing the plot are his own aide (Kirk Douglas), a drunken Georgia senator (Edmond O’Brien), and a skeptical White House adviser (Martin Balsam).

Director John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate) keeps the ambling script by The Twilight Zone‘s Rod Serling on course, building suspense with each new detail revealed. But there’s not much of a payoff, with a final confrontation between March and Lancaster lacking the showdown punch it demands. A  love story between Douglas’ Colonel “Jiggs” Casey and Scott’s former mistress (Ava Gardner) doesn’t amount to much either. Still, the thrills in this movie are in the trip and not the destination. The buildup to the seventh day, as well as seeing the cabal’s plot emerge, make for riveting entertainment.

On The Beach (1959): After a nuclear war eradicates all life in the Northern Hemisphere, a lone American submarine comes to Australia, the last outpost of civilization. As the sub’s captain (Gregory Peck) falls in love with a local drunk (Gardner again, virtually photocopying her character from Seven Days In May), he prepares to lead the sub on a reconnaissance mission to the California coastline. He’s joined by an Australian naval lieutenant (Anthony Perkins) deeply reluctant to leave behind his young wife (Donna Anderson) and infant daughter. Meanwhile Australia prepares for the deadly clouds of radioactive gas and debris slowly coming its way, including dealing with food and gas shortages and receiving government-issued suicide pills.

Adapted from what must have been one hell of a novel by Nevil Shute, the mesmerizing concept is hampered somewhat by pacing and tension that often lack the punch they deserve, partly due to inappropriately relaxed staging by director Stanley Kramer (Guess Who”s Coming To Dinner) that lets the reality of the characters’ situation slip out from under the story. The problems are further abetted by undercooked performances from Peck (playing his usual noble stiff persona) and Perkins (who’s never completely convincing as a Naval officer.) However, Fred Astaire is charming in his debut dramatic performance as a rattled scientist who feels at least a little complicit in Armageddon. The third act redeems the early sluggishness, however, with Kramer’s shot compositions taking an increasingly stark perspective as the human race fades out. The final shot, heavy-handed as anything, gets you in the gut nonetheless.

Fail-Safe (1964): After a computer error sends a squadron of nuclear-armed American bombers on a mission to annihilate Moscow, the U.S. President (Henry Fonda) and a group of scientists and policymakers (including Walter Matthau in a rare heavy role) sweat out the bombers’ flight from a bunker deep underground. The final sacrifice Fonda’s unnamed president makes is uniquely poignant but completely terrifying nonetheless.

Using claustrophobic close-ups and narrow, oddly lit sets, director Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon) creates a deliberate sense of nightmarish dread. The action is played out remotely, using only impersonal maps that underscore the removed distance of the devastation to come, while the tension comes from the palpable anxiety played out through finely wrought performances. All in all an exhausting film experience, but an unforgettable one nonetheless.

Following the success of Stanley Kubrick’s similarly themed Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (released earlier that same year, to much greater box office than Fail-Safe ), Cold War thrillers faded somewhat from the American cinema landscape as the Vietnam war intensified and the Cuban Missile Crisis faded from the national memory. Still, the films’ sense of bleak outrage and leery cynicism tinged with hope would influence much of the best science fiction of the following decade, including films such as Silent Running, Damnation Alley and especially Soylent Green. Perhaps suggesting the cyclical nature of such works, both On the Beach and Fail-Safe were remade for television in 2000.

- Michael Kabel

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Five Good Books That Should Be Great Movies

Great novels that are due and overdue for a leap to the big screen.

Ignatius Reilly, the poster child for Development Hell

Books, as we’ve said before, are like movies that play in your head. Good books are movies you don’t mind watching over and over again on the screen in your mind. The film industry has appropriated all kinds of books virtually since its inception, taking material from the best fiction and nonfiction as well as from the lowest genre potboilers. There’s just no way of predicting how a book will translate: Hollywood has made masterpieces out of humble paperbacks but also made garbage of bona fide classics. Films and movies aren’t exactly alike, but they’re close enough in structure and pacing that it’s sometimes hard to believe filmmakers could screw up excellent source material. But they manage.

We were excited by recent news announcing that Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars novels are headed for filming soon, at last bringing two classics of science fiction into cinema. The following is five additional examples of worthy books we’d like to see on the screen, if only so that cinema’s much wider audience can take notice of their superb stories. Just for the sake of variety, we’ve tried to include samples of literature of many different styles and periods.

Life During Wartime, by Lucius Shepard (1987) Shepard’s Cold War thriller is part horror tale, part allegory and part military war epic, forming a mosaic of genres typical of his strange genius. Set amid a U.S.-led guerrilla war in Central America, the story follows infantryman David Mingolla as he joins an elite cadre of psychic tacticians but finds his fledgling abilities much much vaster than he realized, allowing him to bend reality to his will and challenge the other psychics manipulating world events. Suggested cast: We imagine Jeremy Renner (The Unusuals) playing Mingolla, with Vinessa Shaw (Two Lovers) as his adversary and kindred spirit Deborah. Imagine the film as: A cross between Scanners, Apocalypse Now, and The Matrix. Ideal director: David Cronenberg.

The Big Nowhere, by James Ellroy (1988) A homophobic sheriff’s deputy, a mafia thug and an anguished investigator desperately pursue a brutal serial killer through McCarthy-era Los Angeles while communists, gangsters and politicians jockey for power. The second and arguably the darkest of Ellroy’s “L.A. Quartet” cycle of novels, it’s similar in tone and structure to L.A. Confidential but even bleaker and more cynical. And its ending, for better or worse, is anything but “Hollywood.” Suggested cast: Ryan Gosling (Fracture) stars as the self-loathing Deputy Danny Upshaw, alongside Michael Hogan (Battlestar Galactica) as repentant enforcer Buzz Meeks and Dean Winters (Oz) as weary crusader Mal Considine. No one on Earth should be allowed to play the monumentally evil Dudley Smith except James Cromwell, who nailed the same role in L.A. Confidential. Imagine the film as: Chinatown, Body Double and Manhunter combined. Ideal director: James Gray.

Five Skies, by Ron Carlson (2007) Three men – a petty criminal, a recent widower, and a Hollywood construction foreman – work at building a stunt ramp beside a gorge in the Idaho wilderness, all so that a female stunt driver (think Danica Patrick) can jump the ravine on Pay Per View. The three men confront their past as the ramp slowly takes shape and form. Suggested cast: Damian Lewis (Life) stars as the guilt-ridden foreman Arthur Key, alongside Chris Pine (Star Trek) as thief Ronnie Panelli and Sam Elliott as the heartbroken Darwin Gallegos. Imagine the film as: The Wages of Fear and Tender Mercies merged with Days of Heaven. Ideal director: Terrence Malick.

The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford  (1927) Easy to visualize as a costume drama with an edgy anger to it - an antidote to the huffing and puffing Oscarbait of recent years – Ford’s Victorian Era novel swirls around two married couples spending weeks together over twenty years at a German spa. The titular good soldier, Edward Ashburnham, is a perfect English gentleman except for his almost compulsive need to seduce women – including his friend’s wife. Long praised as an influential work both for its structure and style, the book was previously a 1981 telepic, so its time has easily come round again. Suggested cast: Liev Shreiber (Defiance) and Cate Blanchett (Bandits) play Ashburnham and his lover Florence Dowell; Robert Downey, Jr. costars as the cuckolded John Dowell alongside Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Dark Knight) as Leonora Ashurnham. Imagine the film as: A mix of Last Year At Marienbad, The Ice Storm, and The English Patient. Ideal director: Michael Winterbottom.

Night Train, by Martin Amis (1997) Amis’ critically-lauded 1997 fling with the hardboiled detective genre features an alcoholic, emotionally crippled police detective trying to solve the apparent suicide of a beautiful scientist with every reason to live. The investigation takes a turn for the darkly existential, and Amis twists conventions further by making the troubled detective a woman, too. The novel’s abrupt ending is like two fingers joliting out of the page, poking you in the eyes. Suggested cast: Laura Linney (Breach) plays the self-destructive Detective Mike Hoolihan, Amy Adams (Enchanted) plays the deceased Jennifer Rockwell, and Paul Schneider (Away We Go) co-stars as Rockwell’s lover and suspected killer Trader Faulkner. Imagine the film as: The Pledge, Prime Suspect and Laura compressed into a brainy whodunnit. Ideal director: John Dahl.

- Michael Kabel
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Review: Watchmen

Zack Snyder’s adaptation of the legendary comics series is violent, obscure, self-sabotaging.

Watchmen is a film that wants to be more than it is – at least most of the time. Based on the highly-praised (perhaps overpraised) 1980s-era DC Comics mini-series and at least twenty years in its journey from page to screen, Zack Snyder’s epic vision of a parallel America where super-heroes have worked, thrived and perished for years, the film comes to theatres atop the crest of a marketing juggernaut matched only by fan expectations. Does it succeed? Well, like the ink blot tests at the center of one character’s obsessions, that largely depends on how you see the film as a work of adaptation and as a film in its own right.

On the one hand, it’s slavishly devoted to the comic’s atmosphere, characters, and even dialogue. On the other, Snyder’s insistence on highly stylized violence – the same gimmick that made his previous 300 such a blood-soaked thrill – works against the intelligent-approach-to-superheroes leitmotif that has always served as the comic’s standard. Snyder, unwisely, attempts to have his cake and eat it too, presenting haunted characters doomed by their humanity who  nevertheless relish beating the shit out of other people. The two work at cross-purposes to one another, and while the 163-minute film never lags or suffers for pace, there’s often a sense of it getting winded, too. Superheroes don’t get tired – at least these don’t – but the emotional pitch often warbles and peters out.

Tell me what you see: Rorschach

The plot is faithfully byzantine, and fans of the comic series (who are going to enjoy the film the most anyway) will recognize dozens of visual and aural references to the world minutely created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. For the layman viewer such density of information will probably prove disorienting, but in broad strokes the world works as a nightmarish amplification of the worst excesses of the Reagan/Thatcher Era, including all the paranoia and shame that accompanied them. A real problem sometimes emerges when the talented cast attempts to bring Moore’s pulp-inspired dialogue to life. Jackie Earle Haley, playing the haunted vigilante Rorschach, has the biggest task in this regard but also succeeds the most, bringing palpable feeling to his minimalist voice-overs. The rest of the performers don’t fare as well, often bringing to mind Harrison Ford’s famous admonition to George Lucas on the set of Star Wars: “You can type this shit, but you sure can’t say it.”

Crying on the inside: The Comedian

But amid the dogged loyalty shown by Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter (X-Men) and Alex Tse, the changing of the book’s ending comes both as a surprise and a relief, yet it still doesn’t entirely make sense. Watchmen the comic’s ending has long been a subject of debate and even derision (the book’s own editor, Wolverine creator Len Wein, fought with Moore but relented). To be fair, the original ending is both derivative (though openly so) and quite a bit dated by now. Hayter and Tse’s script turns the central mystery inward but fail to really examine the ramifications of its execution, and Snyder tries to ram the idea past the audience with bluster and speed. Neither tactic works.

She bangs: Silk Spectre II

The film would work much less than it does if not for the performances that manage, often against overwhelming odds, to emerge from the special effects and tediously long and gruesome fight sequences. Billy Crudup finds the character of godlike Dr. Manhattan in the estranged superbeing’s lonesome voice, while Patrick Wilson (Lakeview Terrace) disappears inside the flabby self-loathing of the myopic Nite Owl. Less commendable are the turns by Malin Ackerman (The Heartbreak Kid) as Laurie Jupiter, the second Silk Spectre, and Matthew Goode (Match Point) as Adrian Veidt, the hero turned media mogul. Moore wroter Veidt as a dispassionate, virtually asexual intellectual; while Goode’s glacial good looks fit the part he never brings any depths to the character’s dark intellect. Meanwhile Ackerman struggles with a role that’s underwritten to the point of insignificance. Perhaps the delicate balance of family versus self and the struggle for a father figure at the heart of Jupiter’s character was beyond the screenwriters’ capability or outside their interest. Whatever the reason, her character was neglected most in adaptation, and the big reveal regarding her paternity doesn’t quite come off as a result.

When Nite Owl steps on your foot, you feel it.

The action sequences aside, there are finally other problems with Snyder’s sense of staging and scene construction, and even the most casual viewing reveals missed chances. One particular wasted opportunity involves a third-act reconciliation between Nite Owl and Rorschach, as the latter begs his former partner’s forgiveness for being obstinate. Though the scene screams for close-ups, to show the emotions bursting forth from beneath the masks, Snyder frames the moment as a static medium two-shot. Other visual counterpoints to character growth used so masterfully in the comics – a crystal castle splinters and falls as memories come to light, dirigibles hover over death, a perfume advertisement heralds a new future - are all curiously missing.

The cynical response, obviously, is that Snyder or the screenwriters just missed them when reading the comics. And it’s possible a repeated viewing might show that their understanding of the comics’ themes and still-timely message is in fact only skin deep. I hope not. After 23 years, the Watchmen movie shouldn’t feel like a waste of time.

- Michael Kabel
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Review: Quantum of Solace

An anguished Bond for these anxious times.

There’s a theory, which I don’t necessarily believe is airtight, that the James Bond movies often reflect the spirit of the times of their release. Sean Connery’s films showed the Cold War as a Jet Age go-go romp, while the Roger Moore years of the 1970s were self-loathing and oversexed. Timothy Dalton’s late-80s/Early 90s films were directionless and tepid, while Pierce Brosnan’s luxuriated tenure in the late 90s and early 00′s was cleverly marketed but not particularly substantial.

I think the creators of Quantum of Solace, and also its predecessor Casino Royale, want to bulldoze any such ambiguity. Their Bond is a secret agent for right now: resentful and vaguely bitter, and more than a little pissed off at his surrounding turn of events. This political relevance, mixed with jaw-dropping stunts equal to the Bond tradition, make the new film a hell of a ride. It might be the shortest Bond film yet and the most expensive, but you won’t feel the one or begrudge the other.

Picking up almost immediately where Casino Royale left off, the film presents Daniel Craig’s muscular, almost thuggish Bond determined to get vengeance for the death of Vesper Lynd, his lover in the previous film who died protecting him. When a betrayal close to M (Judi Dench, splendidly imperious as ever) almost causes her death, Bond lights out to track down his only lead. Along the way he crosses paths with Camille (Olga Kurylenko), a Bolivian Secret Service agent who’s infiltrated Lynd’s organization on her own mission of vengeance. Their righteous paths intersect at Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), a land developer with a cruel agenda beneath the Bolivian desert.

The plot only gets trickier from there, expanding to include a cat and mouse game above an opera house in Austria, a firefight amid a roaring inferno within a luxury hotel, and an intense airplane dogfight and parachute drop in dizzying closeup detail. Again, the senses of modernization and of back-to-basics is unmistakable: the Bond of the nifty gadgets is gone, replaced by an agent fighting the laws of physics to stay alive. Even when Craig gets the chance to be smug, as when discovering the cabal’s members at the opera house, or when indulging in a fling with British embassy worker Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton), the surrounding menace makes the bon vivance seem elusive at best.

Screenwriters Paul Haggis (Crash) and Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (Die Another Day) keep the tension mounting, closing in the walls on Bond and whomever chooses to side with him. When Fields is murdered, her body allows a clever homage to a classic Bond image that also makes a shrewd comment on how standards of wealth have changed in the last half-century. It’s a startlingly clever story beat, made all the more memorable by this new Bond’s compassion for her fate. But her death also gets Bond’s agent status revoked, so that for the film’s third act he’s acting of his own will. Fittingly, Craig plays his role as a man who buries his pain just deep enough to keep him on mission.

Director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball) keeps the script’s momentum moving, even if some of the non-action sequences have trouble finding an effective pace. Watch Camille’s first conversation on the dock with Greene – it drags on and on, while Bond waits around off-camera. A later scene between Bond and Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) flies by like a bullet, not entirely making sense nor earning its keep in the plot. But the action sequences are the film’s strength – along with Craig’s increasingly Robert Ryan-like charisma – and those are superbly pulled off. Fans of the Jason Bourne trilogy will recognize those films’ influence in Bond’s fistfights, including an early apartment-set dust-up between Bond and a hitman that ends with such glacial calm that the audience is tempted to mistake what’s happening.

Craig is ably assisted by a stronger than usual cast. Kurylenko brings depth to the tortured Camille, while Dench’s M conveys a subtle maternal instinct for Bond that doesn’t impede her professionalism. Amalric is wonderfully reptilian as the conniving Greene, and Giancarlo Giannini (Man On Fire), reprising his Casino Royale role as Mathis, communicates both class and an oddly endearing Old World melancholy. Bond films have traditionally used their supporting casts as little more than talking window dressing, so the overt attempt to flesh out the human wreckage left in Bond’s wake is both overdue and welcome.

One final caveat: the film assumes its audience clearly remembers the events of Casino Royale, so a repeat viewing of that original before seeing this sequel will likely help you avoid confusion. Though it’s not necessary, it’ll help you understand the larger forces at work within the overarching story, forces that extend into the next installment even as this film concludes.

- Michael Kabel
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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Long-awaited fourth adventure collapses under its own wait. 

After nineteen years, could Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull possibly live up to expectations? And what kind of movie would in fact please everyone? Well, you’d think George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford et al. could’ve done better than this. 

Unevenly paced, slow to find its rhythms and too impressed with itself by half, the fourth installment of the beloved retro-series shows the mish-mash of the endless script versions, revisions and rewrites that dragged its development out for years without ever gelling into a coherent whole. The plot, such as it is, involves Jones’ attempts to find and return a crystal skull – a Macguffin if ever there was one – to its rightful place in a long-secreted South American temple. He gets help from Brando-esque teen rebel Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf), his ex-love Marian Ravenwood (Karen Allen), and a former colleague (John Hurt) turned holy fool by the skull’s mysterious properties. They’re pursued – relentlessly, incredulously – by Soviet agent Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), a one-dimensional Russian baddie complete with jodhpurs and fencing rapier. There’s family drama, and lost love, and some jokes about growing old gracefully. But they’re murmurs in the whirlwind of the action.

Except now the whirlwind feels winded. Lucas and Spielberg, to paraphrase P.T. Barnum, never went broke underestimating the intelligence of their audience, but this time the film’s gaps in plotting and common sense are too wide to ignore. Problems of logic and reason are left untended, until what’s supposed to be escapism becomes instead distracting. In the case of a less-celebrated director, such gaps would get blamed on lack of skill. Here, they hint of complacency – worse, of arrogance. Adding self-indulgence to injury, the directors endlessly rehash their favorite visual motifs. 1950s nostalgia? It’s there, first thing. Cute animals that behave like humans? In abundance, no less than twice. Mindless, stupid gore? Better believe it. Overlong set pieces? Of course. The many obvious soundstages look Disney-theme-park fake, as well, as if shot on a studio backlot. While that’s partly homage to the serials of yesteryear, it’s also glaringly artificial.

As for the performances, the actors make the most of the few scenes they have that don’t involve punching, jumping, ducking, or lunging. Ford and LaBeouf have a comfortable rapport, but their instant familiarity telegraphs a mid-film revelation that will surprise no one with intelligence greater than the film’s numerous CGI prairie dogs. Blanchett has been better, and Allen isn’t given much to do except drive whatever commandeered vehicle lays around, moon over Ford, and serve as an example of aging gracefully. LaBeouf isn’t terrible in a part that’s obviously meant to satisfy Lucas’ seeming compulsion to introduce minors into deadly situations and an overweening readiness to spin off a new franchise.

And Ford. At 65, the actor looks worn down to his last but still game for a final adventure. Unfortunately, the effortless charm that endeared Han Solo and Indy to a generation is at a low flame here, only coming to life in occasional scenes where he manages to imbue a little weariness into the shrillness around him. Even just an extra scene or two more might’ve helped the film towards becoming a fully-realized piece – but there’s special effects and fights and a field of killer ants and raging waterfalls and an army of angry monkeys (honestly) that won’t wait for such luxuries. The film aims to amaze, not entertain.

Twenty four hours after its debut, a backlash is already brewing. If the public rejects this last installment as more Temple of Doom than Last Crusade, who’s responsible? American film audiences are a fickle lot, and modern genre devotees especially delight in second-guessing film creators about how a follow-up can – and more importantly should – be handled. And of course the results are often disappointing and even dispiriting. But we as ticket buyers expect more from the best filmmakers of their generation, especially after waiting through years of rumors and hints about one last ride with the hero of many a childhood. We expect more, and for decades of loyalty we as fans actually sort of deserve it.

- Michael Kabel

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