Harrison Ford returns as the titular adventurer in Indiana Jones: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. (David James/Paramount Pictures)

When it comes to blockbusters, there’s no better way to gauge an audience’s up-for-it-ness than by counting the number of sartorial tributes on opening night. And so it was that a recent free screening of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in Toronto contained at least two fedoras, and a cheerful kid in what looked like a flammable nylon Imperial Stormtrooper suit. Somehow, that counts.

I don’t think anyone left disappointed, but the fourth chapter of the franchise, which has earned $1.2 billion US thus far, didn’t induce too many crazy whooping cheers, either. That may be revealing, as such sounds are often at a premium when one didn’t shell out for the seats. (Really: I’ve heard people bring the noise at A Prairie Home Companion because they got in for free.)

The most audible cheer came early, when the outline of that fedora first appeared. Twenty-seven years after Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) — archeologist, adventurer, millinery shop frequenter — still has the audience’s good will. Director Steven Spielberg announces his intention for the entire film in the opening scene: a car of teenagers joyriding across the desert to an Elvis tune. The squealing, ecstatic kids race along, arms in the air, under a wide-open sky. Spielberg is daring you not to have fun.

And anyone who survived the last one deserves some. When Indy rode off into the sunset at the end of the goofy, Oedipal Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, you wanted to wave him back in for a do-over. Here it is, 19 years later — in our time as well as in movie years — which brings our hero to 1957. That desert turns out to be an atomic bomb testing region of Nevada. Indy has been kidnapped and brought to a military compound. He’s pulled out of a car trunk only to be surrounded by crates of classified government evidence and gun-wielding, uniformed Russians. Leading the KGB agents is Colonel Professor Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), a campy villainess in a Hitler power suit; she’s either very James Bond or very Austin Powers, depending where you stand. Blanchett goes for it, strutting in her Edith Head bob, pointedly snapping on S&M leather gloves as she lectures Indiana Jones on the meaning of a long-lost crystal skull that she would veddy much like to find.

So begins the fuzzy mapping of the action movie, where motivation is much harder to read than destination. David Koepp takes writing credit (though the script reportedly bounced from writer to writer for 15 years), with George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson credited for “story.” Lucas’s distance from the script (he executive produces) thankfully means that the film, for all its murk, is never as agonizingly convoluted as his unwatchable Star Wars franchise. Spielberg is too economical a director to bog down the picture with a lot of exposition; the guy moves fast and trusts the audience to keep up. Mostly, we do, and a vague plot emerges.

The crystal skull — picture a large, toothy, transparent eggplant stuffed with Saran Wrap — is the key to the world’s knowledge, which has something to do with paranormal happenings, a group of lost conquistadors and a city of gold in South America. You know the drill: Indy must travel, meet questionably stereotypical indigenous peoples and pillage their wares (or put them back) in the name of greater good.

Cate Blanchett plays Russian villain Irina Spalko in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. (David James/Paramount Pictures)

After a fun, Dr. Strangelove-like nuclear explosion in Nevada (which Indy survives by locking himself in a fridge; cool in at least two ways), he’s dragged to darkest Peru. The Russians want him to get the skull secret from his old archeological colleague Professor (Ox) Oxley (John Hurt), who has gone a little loco (ratty hair and sandals) on the Amazon.

Also in Peru for some rescuing is Indy’s long-lost paramour from Raiders. As the mule-headed Marion Ravenwood, Karen Allen has been permitted to age like a man — surgery-free — and how wonderfully shocking it is to see an age-appropriate couple on screen (though she is nine years younger than Ford – you take what you can get). They’re both a little jowly, with a touch of middle-age spread. But after that mild shock when Ford has his first close-up, the surprise fades: the old professor can still kick it, taking on armies both Incan, Russian and crawly (red ants and scorpions are the requisite stomach-churning invaders). And when the two leads smile at each other and get that matinee banter going, there’s more heat than anything Kutcher and Diaz could generate with a box of Zippos.

The Indiana Jones films thrill on formula: they’re a franchise largely without metaphor, and the meaning is the lack of message. In 1981, Raiders seemed like a reaction to the sombre tone of ’70s American neo-realism. Spielberg and Lucas were determined to bring quality to the commercial pulp of their youths. Audiences lapped up the revival, eager to return to the simplicity of a good (machete vs.) gunfight, happily distracted from the moral grey zone of post-Nixon America.

But the cultural mood is different now, and the slightness of the story looks funny beside the film’s expansiveness (and expensiveness: it cost a reported $185 million US). There might have been an opportunity here to say something – anything – about the world in between chase scenes, but it’s missed. At one point, Indy’s old academy friend, played by Jim Broadbent, bemoans McCarthy-era snitching with this line: “I barely recognize this country anymore. The government has us looking for commies in our tea.” If the phrase is a nod to the current erosion of civil liberties in America, it’s an idea that’s muttered and abandoned, never to be heard from again.

And yet, if Crystal Skull doesn’t attempt the insight of a smarter adventure like The Bourne Ultimatum, it is still infinitely superior to the legion of brainless action films that are standard for the genre. The humour and sheer force of the film’s action sequences serve as cruel reminders of the mediocrity that defines modern imitators like National Treasure or The Mummy. Spielberg limits the computer-generated imagery in favour of real sets, and there’s something visceral, substantial about the creaking chambers and mossy pyramids that crack open into water-filled corridors and cobwebbed traps. It’s matinee trash of the highest order, not sanitized digital perfection of the lowest.

Still, Crystal Skull drags in the middle with an endless jungle chase, and no one likes to witness their parents trying to be cool, which is exactly how it feels when Shia LaBeouf turns up as Marion’s son (put it together, Sherlock). If Spielberg and Lucas are hoping to lure the Hannah Montana set to theatres by putting this little creampuff next to Mr. Manly Ford, they shouldn’t have dressed him up like Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Poor LaBeouf: everyone under 20 is going to ask: “Who’s Marlon Brando?” And everyone over is going to say: “Not him.”

LaBeouf – suppressing his natural brainiac charm for something unflatteringly grumpy – does all right, but he doesn’t own silence the way Ford does. As an actor, Ford’s is a limited palette, but it’s one that works: his Indiana knows that actions speak louder than words, and none of this is to be taken too seriously. Even when Spielberg allows the climax to degenerate into a strangely self-important homage to some of his non-Indy films, Ford grins and pushes through it, without irony, and with infectious, unabashed pleasure. Welcome back.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull opens May 22.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.

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