Find Shark, Jump Shark

I saw Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull on Saturday night. It was like watching a sweded production of a script so terrifyingly bad it had been locked in a steel vault inside a military warehouse far from the eyes of man, but with A-list actors and an actual budget. As I watched my youthful memories of Raiders of the Lost Ark being thoroughly vandalised, I wondered if the stars had been kidnapped for real as well as on the screen; there was a wild-eyed look to Ford et al that made me suspect they were dragged from their Bel Air beds in the middle of the night and forced to perform at gunpoint in some remote Eastern European state.

In the first forty minutes or so, Indiana survives a nuclear explosion by hiding in a fridge, and his son performs a series of Tarzan-like stunts swinging vine-to-vine in the jungle with sufficient Spiderman-like dexterity he catches up with a truck in an action sequence designed to make Scooby Doo cartoons look like bleak exercises in Dogma-style realism. After that, it gets progressively sillier until it achieves a kind of reality-destabilising ur-silliness, whereupon you feel the urge to bite off one of your own fingers and use the stump to scrawl a warning on the floor of the cinema not to watch the movie.

According to an article in The Independent:

"It seems that Spielberg, the director, and Ford, the star, had severe doubts about mystic, crystal skulls as the story line for the new Indiana Jones story, the first to appear since 1989. One of the reasons for the long delay, according to Hollywood gossip, is that Spielberg and Ford hated the skulls idea, put forward by George Star Wars Lucas, who wrote the script. But after a dozen re-writes, they were brought around."

Brought around? Brought around? Bribed? Threatened? The severed heads of Greys mailed to them? Enough money to buy Mexico? Oh Steven, Steven. You might as well drag that festering Jaws prop out of the garage and take a running jump over it.