Finally, a movie has beaten Sunshine for the shortest cast list, with a mere eight people. You don’t even need to bother with three of the names. You never see what they look like, they don’t really act, and they might as well have been played by three random body doubles. I mean, they cast a supermodel, and never even show her face! But they’re the title characters, just the same, and they’re darned annoying.
When I was little, watching Looney Tunes cartoons, I never liked to watch the Roadrunner cartoons because I always wanted the Coyote to win, and of course he never could. It was just that everything always went the Roadrunner’s way, and poor Wile E. could never catch a break. After a while, I got so frustrated on his behalf that I couldn’t bear to watch anymore. This is kind of like a 90-minute version of one of those cartoons, only here there are two coyotes: Liv Tyler as Kristen McKay, and Scott Speedman as James Hoyt. And there are three roadrunners: The Man in the Mask, Dollface, and Pin-Up Girl. The two girls get real masks; but the Man in the Mask is actually wearing a bag over his head, with eyeholes and a mouth painted on. I think it’s burlap. Anyway, it must make it hard to breathe, because he spends most of the movie wheezing like an asthmatic. But even if he is asthmatic, it doesn’t matter, because he’s a roadrunner, so everything goes just the way he wants it to.

Liv Tyler competes in the 100-yard crawl under the watchful eye of a supermodel.

I’m not exaggerating. It’s like covering their faces gives them the power to read minds. Their victims make a break for the car; they’re waiting to stop them. Their victims set up a trap; they neatly turn it against them. About halfway through, I was absolutely desperate for those two to find some good luck. I wanted to help them, and just kept fidgeting in my chair.
I think part of the problem was that the victims weren’t being quite as stupid as one might expect. They have their moments, of course — for instance, when things start to turn weird, Liv very sensibly exchanges the frilly dress she was wearing (they’ve been at a wedding reception) for jeans and a flannel shirt. Except she never actually puts shoes on, or even socks, and runs around barefoot the rest of the film, which is the opposite of sensible when avoiding homicidal maniacs. But for the most part, they don’t make a whole lot of moves that make you want to scream, “What were you people thinking of??” So I kept thinking that things would simply have to get better for them somehow, but they never did, and it was frustrating. And you know how people say that having a cell phone is safe, because then you’re never without a phone to call for help? It doesn’t help these two any, because you still end up without a phone. The batteries die, you can’t get a signal, or you leave it out in the car and the serial killers steal it; and you’re so dependent on the thing you don’t know what to do when hitting ‘Send’ doesn’t get you anywhere.
*ahem* Anyway. Two and three-quarter idols — one for Liv, one for Scott, and the three-quarters because the filmmakers took a bit of a risk, and it did work to an extent. The acting was solid, but it did suffer from something of the same problem The Hitcher did, and I can’t believe I’m saying that, because this was way better than The Hitcher. But though it is cool and trendy to hide the villains’ motives, too much of that just gets really aggravating. Basically, ninety minutes was a little too long. It needed to be more the length of a Loony Tunes cartoon.

New musics.
Achilles – Written as theme music for an epic drama. This starts broad and kicks into awesome at 0:27.
Bass Vibes – This piece gets a little atonal in parts.
Takeover of the 8-bit Synths – This… uhh… hmm… let’s call it ‘experimental’ piece starts out with vanilla guitar and rock drums, and gets progressively crazier as the 8-bit synths take over the piece. Maximum anarchy starts around the 3-minute point.
Trio for Piano Violin and Viola – An unfinished trio in 2 main parts.

That’s the longest title I’ve had to type out yet, I think. But admit it; you’re humming the theme right now. You can’t help it. There are people in Outer Mongolia who know that tune. And it’s all back — the hat, the whip, the wild stunts, and the uniformed bad guys. Okay, this time they’re Soviet soldiers instead of Nazis, but close enough.
It’s 1957, the Cold War is in full swing, and Indy is — well, doing pretty much what he was doing when we last saw him. He’s been nabbed by the bad guys and hauled off to a huge government storage facility filled with poorly labelled crates, because there’s something in that mess that the Soviets (led by Cate Blanchett in a black wig and funky jumpsuit) want. No, it isn’t the crate you’re thinking of. It’s a crate full of something magnetic, only it isn’t, because it attracts gold, which isn’t magnetic, and occasionally repels entirely non-metallic things instead, like giant insects and angry natives.
The crystal skull of the title is basically like these skulls that the new-age types like to use for meditation and psychic energy and stuff. They name them and everything. This one remains nameless, though, and looks like it belongs to a Grey or a Bug-Eyed Monster alien, or whatever they’re called these days. Legend has it that whoever returns the skull to the place it was stolen from, back when the Conquistadors were ransacking everything, will gain control of its power. Where was it stolen from, you ask? Why, the ancient lost city of Acator, of course, better known as El Dorado, the City of Gold. It isn’t really quite a city of gold, sadly, but it is nifty-looking.
The fact that people (including himself) have been searching fruitlessly for this city for centuries doesn’t faze our hero, though, and the intrepid Dr. Jones is soon on his way there, with the nice little journey-marked-on-map sequence that you’re picturing right now. As in Live Free or Die Hard, he now has a younger assistant in tow to help with some of the rough stuff, one Mutt Williams. No, that’s not a typo — he calls himself Mutt. It’s written on his jacket. He’s a 1950’s greaser obsessed with combing his hair, which is amusing, and rides around on a vintage Harley-Davidson, which I’m sure will make some people in the audience drool. Indy seems to think he’s too old for this (though he also wants to prove himself in the face of Mutt’s conviction that an old teacher isn’t going to be any help), but old friends are in danger, and he dives in to the breach.

Just because he always works at night does not make him a grave robber. Honestly.

And in a way, it’s sort of like watching any of the first three movies again (well, maybe not Temple of Doom — that singer drove me crazy, and the new characters here aren’t like that). It sticks to the formula, but isn’t too terribly repetitive. It’s moved with the times, which helps — the gap between the movie and Last Crusade is roughly the same in real life as in the fictional timeline, and Harrison Ford does a good job making Indy a little more world-weary. And he’s still in quite good shape, which impressed me. There are plenty of references to past characters and situations, so watch for those, fun guest-stars, and surprises that aren’t really surprises, but are enjoyable just the same.
The stunts have of course gotten wilder, because they always seem to do that for sequels. Indy takes a ride on a rocket-propelled car, falls down not one but three waterfalls in a little vehicle that looks rather like a Duck from Wisconsin Dells, snags guns with his whip, retrieves his hat from the weirdest places, and even stumbles into a nuclear testing site. (Kids, don’t try this at home!) The violence is still almost cartoonish and not at all bloody, so it’s fairy safe for the younger set, though the huge ants might freak them out. They freaked me out a little — think the scarabs from The Mummy and you’ve got them pretty well pictured. (Technically, they’re African ants and our adventurers were supposed to be in Peru, but since they were actually in Hawaii anyway, it doesn’t really matter.)
So all in all, it was a ‘safe’ movie. The script was solid but predictable, the acting good, the casting excellent, but no one went out on any kind of creative limb. The formula was there and proven, and they stuck with it. But on the other hand, there weren’t any painful moments, either, where they try too hard to recapture old magic and you just end up wincing. Maybe the long gap helped with that, but in any case, it worked pretty well. So a good, solid four idols. It will fit nicely in your collection next to your other Indy DVDs (they even produced it with a sort of eighties look to the film quality, which was cool), and will be nice to haul out to watch again on rainy Saturday afternoons. And really, innovation all the time would just be exhausting.

I got an email today asking what the piece of music in this is:
Bringing Out The Beasts
I know I wrote it… but I have no idea what it is called.
Email me at kevin@incompetech.com if you know! Thanks!
—
Got it!
It is called “Almost in F”

You’ve seen the trailers (probably). You’ve read the comic books (maybe). Now Iron Man hits the big screen!
To me, Robert Downey Jr. is kind of like Jude Law. They both act so pompous and self-important that I always think actually talking to them would make me feel hopelessly un-famous. But sometimes, like Jude in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, or Robert here, that attitude really works. Tony Stark is supposed to be pompous and self-important — heck, he is important, like any billionaire. He’s smart and not entirely a bad sort, but spoiled (unsurprisingly) and with the attitude of the very early James Bond towards women.
In the comics (yes, I read them as a kid) he was originally wounded in Vietnam, but of course he can’t be that old anymore, so here it’s Afghanistan, where Tony has gone to demonstrate a really huge and scary missile called the Jericho for the military. The convoy he’s riding in is attacked (but since it’s PG-13, there’s remarkably little blood), he scrambles for cover, and gets blown up by a Stark Industries bomb. Yes, they do kind of beat you over the head with the irony, but that’s okay.
He wakes in a cave (or course) filled with terrorists (naturally), who want him to build their very own Jericho. But he’s been all shrapneled up by the little bomb, and is in real danger of dying. A fellow prisoner (his story is a mystery — all you find out about him is that he’s a doctor from a place called Gulmira) named Yinsen has rigged up an electromagnet to keep the shrapnel from moving, so for a while, Tony’s literally carrying a car battery around with him everywhere. I’m not sure that would really work, but like most things in the movie, it seems just plausible enough to make you believe it.
Pretending to build the missile, Tony actually puts together the first Iron Man suit, though of course he doesn’t call it that, and makes a nifty escape, in true dramatic comic book style. Again, there’s not much blood, and for a genius, it’s really pretty stupid of him not to make sure the big bad guys are dead, but nearly every character has their truly stupid moments here (except Yinsen, who has appeared in nearly every Iron Man variation, in one form or another).

Where does he get such wonderful toys…?

Anyway, he escapes, and his first stop once he gets home to Malibu is Burger King. No, really. His next order of business is to announce that Stark Industries isn’t going to make weapons anymore. The stock plummets fifty-some points, and that’s when we know that Obadiah Stane (a bald Jeff Bridges), the anti-Stark, is going to cause problems. Not that anyone who’s read the comic didn’t know that already…
All the supporting cast is there, even the driver, Happy Hogan, though if you blink you’ll miss him–he’s played by the director, Jon Favreau. Besides Stane, there’s Air Force pilot Jim Rhodes (Terrence Howard) and the perfect personal assistant, Pepper Potts (a redheaded Gwyneth Paltrow). Yep, they left her with that very unfortunate name, poor girl; and Gwyneth often seems to end up playing sidekick to the pompous heroes. There’s hints of romance between her and Tony, and the cast is already signed on for two sequels, so expect the announcement of Iron Man 2: Return to Afghanistan to Make Sure the Big Bad Guys Are Dead This Time any day now. There’s even S.H.I.E.L.D., though minus Nick Fury, sort of. These days it stands for Strategic Homeland Intervention, Engagement and Logistics Division, which sounds like something that might actually exist.
The effects are fantastic. In spite of his 1950’s attitude towards women, which seriously embarrassed me once or twice, the whole look of the film is beyond cutting-edge. Tony shows exactly what you can do with enough billions, like manipulating holograms with his hands, building voice-controlled robots with personalities, and breaking things indiscriminantly without worrying about who’s going to replace them. And of course, building self-contained, red and gold suits of power armor with repulsor rays and near-space capability.
So three and three-quarter idols. I had to dock a quarter idol for the bit where they turn Tony’s private plane into a 1960’s go-go club. But otherwise, it’s fun, tongue-in-cheek entertainment, with a dash of moral dilemma thrown in, and the effects alone make it worth the price of admission. The fact that Robert is so good at making us root for his character in spite of ourselves is just an added bonus. Now let’s all prepare for the coming of Nick Fury (aka Samuel L. Jackson) and hope that he’s scarier than he was in that Jumper thing.