Review of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) by Jason M — 07 Dec 2016

Everybody's pick for their least favourite Indy film, I think the problem more than anything is in their choice of McGuffin: whereas the previous three all had some form of religious object (The Ark of the Covenant, The Sankara Stones or the Holy Grail), Kingdom of the Crystal Skull instead opts for the titular Crystal Skull: a non-religious artifact. This is also the film that's responsible for the phrase "blowing up the fridge", meaning to introduce something completely absurd to the proceedings.

As an aside: the fridge motif, and the nuclear test site were both in the original Back to the Future screenplay: the time-machine was meant to look like a fridge (rather than a Delorean), and they were meant to use the blast from the Manhattan project to power the time machine to get back to the (then) present.

Shia LaBeouf is annoying as always, and Cate Blanchett is wasted as the villain of the piece, but all-in-all, this is an OK action movie: nowhere near the league of the original trilogy, but still passable enough, despite all the hate directed its way!