Monterey Jack wrote:Now-now, I never once said I "hated" Last Crusade,
Fair enough. My friend that I was referring to pretty much does.
... but I love the first two Indy films so much that Crusade plays like a comedic remake of it's predecessors.
I guess this is where the difference is.
I dislike Temple of Doom quite a bit.
I haven't watched it in several years and I don't care if I ever see it again.
The only redeeming factor it has for me that I want to see get its long overdue just dues is William's score.
Raiders, of course, is the best because it had a perfect balance of action, humor, suspense, danger, etc. etc. A+ for Raiders, obviously.
Temple went too far to the "let's go for the cheap scares, unnecessary gross outs" and frankly, some material that should have merited an R rating. I'm thinking of the really blatant occult stuff where hearts are getting ripped out and the rest of it.
I remember the first time I saw it was when it came out on VHS and they made the mistake of showing it to us at summer camp. It was 1986 so I was all of 10 years old. Whoops!
Just nasty, dark, depressing stuff. I'll take Last Crusade ANY day of the week over something like that.
If Raiders is a pitch-perfect A+, and Doom is an A, then Crusade is a solid-but-unspectacular B+.
Again, I'd probably give Crusade a B+ along with you but I'd be ranking Temple around a C myself.
Let me put it this way...it was a
lot cooler when I was the same age as River Phoenix's Young Indy in the prologue.
Fair enough.
What I dislike about it is how the "funny" business with Connery constantly berating Ford consistently undercuts any sense of danger in the film's action sequences. In both
Raiders and
Doom, you know, intellectually, that Indy will live to see another day (and sequel), yet you're in a constant state of suspense on
how he's going to get out of his current jam, weither it's the Well Of The Souls or the Bug Tunnel ("We...are going...to
DIE!!!"
). In
Crusade, you've got bland, second-rate villains (come on, Julian Glover vs. Belloq, Toht, or Mola Ram? No contest!) and great characters from
Raiders (Sallah, Brody) reduced to caricatures. And, again...the worst F/X of the trilogy, despite being the most recent film (those early CG saw blades...even in '89, I was like "The hell...?").
All fair critcisms. In fact, I pretty much agree with most of this although I think you may just be being a little hard on the thing.
It's telling that the making-of for the movie on the trilogy set opens with Connery, Ford and Spielberg enacting a Three Stooges routine. I just always felt that Spielberg's decison to make Crusade as light and frothy as possible to "atone" for the dark aspects of Doom rubs me the wrong way.
Fair enough, but damn, I don't blame them. Doom was ridiculously in the other direction and extreme from your criticisms of Crusade.
In Doom, "Anything Goes", and that's what's so thrilling about it for me.
Except whenever it was "anything goes" it usually meant gross outs and nasty, rank occultism.
That's not the kind of stuff I watch an Indiana Jones film for. Again, the standard bearer has been and obviously ever shall be Raiders. You never saw any crap like that in Raiders. You had a little instance with the snakes in Raiders and the ending with the villians getting wiped out by the power in the Ark, but that stuff was so tame compared to Doom it's not even close.
Like Spielberg's Minority Report, it's so brazenly bizzare that, for a "safe" filmmaker, it has a giddy, top-this perversity lacking in a lot of the director's "popcorn" output.
I'll agree with you on the perverse part.
And I haven't liked most of Spielberg's output for quite some time now. I didn't like Minority Report, I didn't like A.I. and I definitely didn't like War of the Worlds all for reasons we've all probably run into the ground a million times by now.
The last Spielberg movie I can say I really liked was Catch Me if You Can. Before that...I think I'm going all the way back to Schindler's List. I'll have to think about that a little more...
Doom has hearts being torn from the chests of still-living victims, and Report has Tom Cruise chasing his own eyeballs down a tilted corridor.
And I just don't care for any of that. Minority Report is, frankly, irrelevant to this discussion, although it's a good starting point for me personally if I want to get into why I really haven't been a Spielberg fan for a good number of years now.
If we're talking about Indiana Jones films and we're all agreeing that Raiders is the standard bearer to go by, then frankly, Doom is just ridiculous to one extreme while you argue Crusade is too much to another extreme.
Fair enough, although obviously Andy and I are going to disagree with you with how far to "the other extreme" Crusade is.
For me, lumps and all, Crusade is closer to Raiders in spirit and tone than Doom by miles.
Crusade has nothing in it as thrilling as the final, breakneck 45 minutes of Doom (which also has the most iconic Ford moment in the trilogy: "Right. ALL of us!").
That's fair enough I suppose.
That said, if Skull is as good as Crusade, I'd be happy enough.
I don't think it will be. In fact, I'll guarantee it here and now.
