Look up "lost opportunity" in the dictionary and you'll see the one-sheet for this film. It lacks every quality for which the originals were so loved: plot, energy, pace, imagination, suspense, smart dialogue, surprising humour and spine-tingling moments of religious wonder. Such a heady mixture regularly had you grinning from ear to ear. This time around you'll be sitting there in slack-jawed wonderment at the lameness of it all. What the hell happened? A dire screenplay, for one thing, which seems cobbled together from several variants. Rather than setting up a simple goal (get the ark, get the stone, get the grail) as the driver for an array of action set-pieces, it seems content just to wander around aimlessly plundering the originals for references. Don't blame David Koepp. He's a reasonable writer, but here seems to have been hired as a typist. No, this cack-handed travesty has the stink of George Lucas all over it - the man who, let's face it, spent the last decade boring us senseless with the storyless downfall of that irritating sap, Anakin Skywalker. Where's Howard Hawks-devotee Lawrence Kasdan when you need him? What happened to the version Frank Darabont wrote? Surely it wasn't worse than this. Performances are fine, but they can't salvage it. Ford is grizzled but convincing because his age is acknowledged. Shia LaBeouf adds some cheek and youthful spark. Karen Allen's sass is tempered with girlish affection and the few snatches of dialogue Marion shares with Indy are among the film's best. Cate Blanchett brings her stagecraft to a ludicrous caricature, but not even she can save the day. The screenplay forbids it. Overall, this is a tremendously disappointing film. Sure, expectations were high. But that's not unreasonable. When one of the world's best filmmakers revives one of the world's most loved series you expect he'll make an effort. None is in evidence here. This is the laziest film Spielberg has ever made.
