Indiana Jones And The Destruction Of Legacy

it might surprise you to know this but sometimes even the mighty critical Drinker gets it wrong like with prey or Suicide Squad or Dungeons and Dragons all of which turned out to be a lot better than I predicted from the trailers but then there's movies like Indiana Jones and the dial tone of density which proved to be exactly the kind of dumb bloated creatively bankrupt nightmarish disasters I always said they'd be sometimes it really does suck to be right seeing through all two and a half hours of this utter garbage was one of the most tedious frustrating and depressing experiences I've ever had in a cinema and I'm from Scotland put simply Indiana Jones and the dial up internet of depravity is an absolute embarrassment of a movie that shames not just the franchise not just the genre but the entire concept of filmmaking it is a complete and utter waste of money and talent made by a shambling wreck of a studio that's basically the Hollywood equivalent of a junkie rifling through his trash department in the hopes of finding one last forgotten stash it is everything we predicted it would be and much much worse so grab your battered Fedora and arthritis meds because we're going in one last time now believe it or not the first 15 minutes of dialysis of dysentery are actually pretty good the action kicks off in World War II where a digitally de-aged Indie is working Behind Enemy Lines to recover the Spear of Destiny before it can get shipped back to Berlin the spear turns out to be a fake in this case but what isn't a fake is a piece of an ancient artifact known as the dial of Destiny built by Archimedes a couple of thousand years ago a device rumored to allow the user to travel through time itself after a bit of fisticuffs Indy ends up recovering half of the dial from a German scientist named voller before heading back to America the whole sequence is fun action-packed and the CGI on Harrison Ford is mostly pretty Goods yeah his face is slightly rubbery at times and is pretty obvious they set the whole thing at night to keep him in Shadow as much as possible but for the most part it kind of felt like an indie movie and that's where the good stuff ends my friends Flash Forward to 1969 and India is now a broken depressed old man living alone in a crummy New York apartment divorced from Marion about to retire from his job and with nothing left to live for no way [ __ ] me lucasfilm you're really scaling new heights of imagination when it comes to Legacy male characters aren't you all we need now is for some Plucky young female character to come into his life and show him the way ha cold air this right here is Helena yet another addition to the growing lineup of brunette British Flawless idealized Kathleen Kennedy self-inserts that are better than their aging male counterparts in every possible way Jesus Christ and they talk about the male ego anyway Helena's on the trail of the dial and she wants Cindy's help tracking it down luckily for her it just so happens to be in the storeroom of Indy's University but no sooner have they retrieved it then they get ambushed by baller who's now a scientist working for NASA and oh no Helena bails out and leaves Indie to fend for himself see it turns out that all she really wanted to do was take the dial for herself so that she could auction it off for massive profits you bastard luckily though Salah shows up and tells Indy that the auction is going to take place in a hotel in Tangiers so that the rest of the plot can happen wow it's lucky that this hotel happens to be the only place on Earth where stolen antiques get bought and sold and even more lucky that Indy's best friend just so happens to know about it shite so he goes to Tangiers and voro shows up too so that the rest of the plot can happen and there's more fighting and a car chase that goes on about 15 minutes longer than it needs to and eventually Indy and Helena team up and head to Greece to recover a tablet thing from a shipwreck that's going to show them the location of the other half of the dial why does all this feel like the plot for Rise of Skywalker all over again anyway Volo shows up again to Ambush them how don't know he just kind of teleports in whenever it's convenient for the plot I guess anyway there's more fighting an Indian Helena escape with the tablet and head to Sicily to recover the second piece of the dial and yet again vulgar and his men short to intercept them how well hold on tight because this just about made my brain explode in the movie theater it's because he grabbed a pair of binoculars and watched them escape the boat Ambush and because they weren't heading in the direction they claimed to be he magically knew exactly what they were planning and where to find them seriously [ __ ] off film anyway so they finally get the second piece of the dial and of course Volver teleports in to intercept them and oh no Indy gets shot and I guess he's dying now but the movie never seems to be entirely clear about that like at some points he seems to be at death's door but then at others he's able to fight and move like he's at full health so your guess is as good as mine I mean given how many times this movie was Rewritten and re-shot I'd be willing to bet that the [ __ ] filmmakers didn't even know for sure anyway let's see if we can finish this [ __ ] sandwich so valer's plan is to use the dial to go back to 1939 and change the course of the war so that Germany wins but unfortunately it takes them all back 2 000 years to the time of Archimedes in the middle of a huge battle with the Roman army so there's yet more fighting and the plane crashes and Indian Helena survive and he asks to stay in the past so that he can die there but then Helena says Nah it'll be fine and knocks him out and takes him back to 1969 against his will and then Marion shows up in a scene that feels about his natural and tonally consistent as Pennywise the clown in an episode of Sesame Street and then the movie just kind of stops like it can't think of anything else to do so it basically just shuffles off the stage and that's it that's the plot for a dialect of Dundee what a [ __ ] incomprehensible Calamity of a film this is I mean I'd be lying if I said I went into it expecting great things but Jesus [ __ ] mothering Christ this was worse than anything I could have imagined for a star it's sluggish and horribly paced running at least 30 minutes too long and built around a protracted fetch Quest where you're never entirely sure what the characters are trying to do or why and after a while you pretty much stop caring fight scenes are weirdly sluggish clumsy and badly edited there's no sense of energy or excitement to any of it and there's multiple vehicle chases that drag on for like 15 minutes each the first three Indie movies delivered brilliantly crafted inventive and impactful action scenes then you just went to pull back and give the audience a break but this one never does combined with sloppy CGI they're more of a chore to get through than an exciting change of pace and you can absolutely tell that this movie was butchered in the editing Bay re-shot and recut multiple times in a desperate attempt to make it work there is result is a hodgepodge of different ideas plot lines and aborty character arcs that just kind of meander along with no real sense of progression or development and as for the ending it's like they run out of time and ideas altogether and just had to go with whatever they could Cobble together there's no sense of dramatic payoff here of carefully developed character arcs getting drawn together into a final fitting conclusion it's just a rushed and nonsensical everyone's happy now so deal with it kind of ending it's no better on the character front either the antagonists are incompetent and comically useless and the only reason they keep getting the drop on Indie is because he's equally stupid and because they can teleport in anywhere they want so that the plot can happen Vora is a complete non-entity who never comes across as even remotely threatening or interesting I mean Mars Mickelson is a great actor but any actor is only as good as the script they have to work with and I've sharted out better things than this script Teddy was clearly intended to be a replacement for short rounds well if you Stripped Away all of his personality charm and likability he's there as a kind of sidekick to Helena who can do whatever the plot needs him to including flying a plane and I'm not kidding there's literally a conversation where Helena asks him if he knows how to fly a Cessna and he replies that he's never flown one before and then she replies that he's never flown any plane before why the [ __ ] did you even ask him then you absolute Cornish pasty Jesus did anyone even read this script before they performed it but by far the worst Defenders are the two leads I actually had second hand embarrassment for Harrison Ford watching him labor and Away on screen in a movie that clearly resented his very presence make no mistake this is not the Indiana Jones that any of us remember this absolute imposter is timid gullible naive sad depressed weak cowardly clueless and incompetent I am [ __ ] sick to death of these absolute brainless posing as writers whose only possible outcome to getting older is turning into a depressed lonely failure he's given up on life how is it possible for a studio to hate the very characters that allow them to exist in the first place and this being a Disney lucasfilm movie there's obviously an obligatory strong female character shoehorned into the story trying desperately to leech off the popularity of the Legacy character they're supposed to replace and of course she's smarter and stronger and more resourceful than him of course she wins every argument and gets proven right about everything and Saves the Day multiple times because what else could she possibly be in a modern Disney movie the problem though is that the script has no idea what to do with her or what kind of person it really wants her to be is she a cold and callous mercenary a compassionate and loyal friend a seductive Femme Fatale a lovable con artist trying to scrape by a quirky Joker the movie doesn't know so it tries to make her a bit of everything with no real overarching trajectory or motivation and the results are as Meandering and pointless as the rest of the movie it doesn't really help that Phoebe Weller Bridge doesn't have the acting range or the qualities needed to play a character like this she's not charismatic enough to be an adventurer she's not Charming enough to be a rogue she's not attractive enough to be a femme fatale and she's not funny enough to be comic relief she throws punches with all the Finesse and expertise of boogie in his first boxing match and she runs like a [ __ ] giraffe all gangly uncoordinated Limbs and awkward flat-footed strides the only time she actually seems at home in the role is when she's pretending to be an Earnest geeky Bookworm to con Indian to helping her and honestly you probably could have done something with a character like that if you were willing to give her a proper Arc ultimately by the time this movie finally ended my only real thought was well that's it then that's it over not just the film not just the character of Indiana Jones but in a bigger sense the very Legacy of George Lucas himself this was it this was the last property left for them to destroy and destroy it they did the cupboards are bare now they've consumed literally everything that we was built up by their predecessors and now there's nowhere left for them to hide there's no excuses left to make this movie is absolutely gonna Crash and Burn and it deserves to because maybe then it'll finally force them to accept the truth they are not creators they are not capable of making great things like their predecessors did they're not even capable of making mediocre things they are destroyers not creators and when you run out of things to destroy well eventually you'll be next anyway that's all I've got for today go away now

Channel: The Critical Drinker

Views: 2,180,059

Keywords: kathleen kennedy, critical drinker, review, funny, best, lucasfilm, disney, feminism, feminist

Id: G_k8cDLe-Kk

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 30 2023