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Classic Movie Review: 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade'

I come not to praise 'Last Crusade', but to bury it and with it my 13-year-old boy nostalgia.

By Sean PatrickPublished 5 years ago 7 min read
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This movie is exhausting. Get ready because this review is going to get rather blasphemous for fans of the famed texts known as Indiana Jones. First let me say, I don’t think that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is a ‘bad movie.’ However, after 30 years, my patience, like my nostalgia, has waned and the film’s flaws have come to the fore for me. Rather than the giddy thrill I felt as a 13 year old, 43-year-old me tired quickly of Steven Spielberg’s rushed narrative and repeated set pieces and tropes.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade begins with a sequence that is about as necessary as any piece of fan fiction ever written. In a sop to fans of the nostalgia stoking franchise, we are taken back in time to find a young Indiana Jones, played by heartthrob River Phoenix, discovering all of the elements that would come to define his future. Strange how everything that came to be the legend of Indiana Jones, from his hat and jacket to his chin scar and whip, all came together in a single 15 minute sequence of time when he was a teenager.

Today, we would rightly call out Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for its blatant and ungodly forced fan service, right down to casting a Tiger Beat cover boy, no offense River fans, as the young Indy. This unnecessary legend building is akin to Prince beginning a record with a song about how he obtained his legendary symbol shaped guitar and how amazing he’s always been at playing it. It’s a masturbatory opening sequence except that George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Harrison Ford are pleasuring themselves over a picture of themselves.

This self-pleasuring opening extends to the casting of Sean Connery, James Bond, as the father of Indiana Jones. Don’t get me wrong, Sean Connery is a solid choice from the perspective of being a fine actor, but let’s not kid ourselves here, the chance to cast James Bond as the father of their own already legendary character is some high level ego stroking. Or the stroking of another kind that I already mentioned.

The Last Crusade of the title is a play on the fact that this adventure has Indiana Jones chasing after the Holy Grail, the cup that Jesus of Nazareth drank from at The Last Supper. The Grail is believed to have healing powers and some people, including the snivelling, villainous, Walter Donovan (Julian Glover), believe the Grail is the key to eternal life. Donovan is the one who sets Indy on the Grail trail, before Indy knows that Donovan is a Nazi sympathizer.

Donovan first approached Indy’s dad, Professor Henry Jones (Connery), to seek the Grail but he’s now gone missing and Indy will need to follow the clues that his father has left him, in the form of a handwritten Grail diary, in order to track him down. Joining Indy on the search are his oldest friends, Dr. Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) and Sallah (Welshman in brown face, John Rhys Davies, in a role that hasn't aged well), and a beautiful, blonde plot point named Elsa (Alison Doody).

If a YouTube aggregator site were to do a video entitled "10 Things Steven Spielberg wants you to forget about Indiana Jones," the top entry on the list might be having both Indy and his dad sleep with Elsa. I grant you, this take comes fully from the perspective of our modern sensibilities toward how we treat women, fictional and non-fictional, but this was just 30 years ago and no one thought how unnecessarily creepy it was for father and son to be Eskimo Brothers?

It's also a sign of how slowly things change in Hollywood. 30 years ago, a mainstream blockbuster film was still saying that the only way a woman could get over on a male protagonist is by sleeping with him. It's unthinkable that she could outsmart him—no, the only option she has is sex. I get that Spielberg and Lucas were merely reflecting their influences but in doing so they were also reinforcing an ugly and unnecessary stereotype. Not to mention how simple and convenient such poor character construction is, reinforcing her position as more plot point and punchline than character.

Creepiness aside, I am probably being a little unfair. It’s rather easy to impose our modern moral paradigm on a movie made 30 years ago that was deeply influenced by movies made 50 years earlier than that. So let’s turn to the filmmaking and tear apart the construction of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. As I mentioned earlier in this review, this movie is exhausting. We begin with child Indy turning immediately into Harrison Ford in a queasy making action scene that, once again, has nothing to do with the plot of the movie.

Harrison Ford’s first scene in the movie is a payoff to the young Indiana Jones sequence and delays the start of Last Crusade for another full 10 minutes, solely to once again put over the legendary toughness and resourcefulness of Indiana Jones. Because, apparently, two previous adventures failed to make that point? Screenwriter Jeffrey Boam may as well be writing Indiana Jones fan fiction before actually getting to the movie he’s supposed to be writing.

Once we actually do get to the Grail hunting plot, there are some fun moments. Indiana Jones in the library with an X marks the spot moment is a sweet and clever bit but that’s followed by a pair of enervating action scenes of increasingly convoluted resolution. The bit with the rats is not bad, it makes the skin crawl in a horror movie fashion for sure, but that becomes rather overdone as the scene lingers, not to mention the dubious science of how Indy and Elsa survive the scene.

Then there is the boat chase sequence. 13-year-old Sean was likely happy to not have a chance to catch his breath from the fiery underground rathole to the boat chase sequence but 43-year-old Sean was exhausted by the unnecessarily overwrought pace of these scenes. The rest of the film will proceed with this kind of pace as well with action scenes tripping over each other as the film aims to make you forget about how long it took for the plot to kick in by wearing you out with action scenes.

All of this does lead to the terrific Grail scene in the cave with a 700-year-old Knight, Indy, Elsa, and the big bad guy. I adore this scene, but I have nitpicks. For instance, after the fourth bad guy got his head chopped off, no one thought to duck? They still would not have made it to the Grail but it’s a reasonable question. That said, I liked watching Indy deciphering the clues and I loved the Knight played by Robert Eddison.

The phrase “You chose… poorly” runs through my mind on an almost daily basis. “You chose… wisely,” I think of less often but it does come up. The ending as well is well done. I liked that Indy still tried to save Elsa despite her villainy. Her minor redemption arc is weak but not terribly done. Her death had a tragic air to it and I liked the way that the desire for the Grail drove even Indy to the brink of madness.

The best part of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, however, is Sean Connery. I have this wonderful notion that Spielberg, Lucas, Harrison Ford and screenwriter Jeffrey Boam wanted Connery to play a dashing hero who inspired and inflamed his son's ego. Instead, in my imagination, Connery showed up and said, Henry Jones is a nebbishy, bookish nerd and all of this adventure nonsense will come second to his intelligence.

That might explain why they had to go so all in on the action: it was in order to overcome Connery’s desire to talk about Charlemagne and reject entirely the chance to do any kind of action. Watch, Henry Jones isn’t here to throw punches, he’s here to wear tweed and a bucket hat and make witty asides while cowering from danger. Not exactly the image of James Bond now, is it? Connery has famously subverted other franchise entertainments, my theory is reasonable.

Perhaps I am just grumpy and middle aged and less fun than I was at 13. That’s likely a theory that defenders of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade will offer. But I am just being honest. I found this film’s pace to be exhausting and unnecessarily so. The pace is completely over the top and while I am not crying out for the movie to be more talky, I think there is a distinct lack in build and payoff. The movie never stops running and it doesn’t feel natural. It feels as if the movie is hiding just how thin and mercenary this effort truly is.

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About the Creator

Sean Patrick

Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.

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