Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of blah blah blah

Let me start by saying that I wanted to be Indiana Jones as a kid. We used to go to Gatlinburg for family vacation, and my brothers and I would all buy those leather whips they sold in the gift shops along with the leather tomahawks and the turquoise Indian jewelry. We would then take these home and proceed to play Indiana Jones until someone (usually me) whipped the other one (usually Ben) and they told mom. Then she would confiscate the whips and do whatever it was she did to make the disappear. I actually tried to whip a tree limb and swing across a small creek behind a friends house when I was in the 2nd grade. That was also the year we made a zip line across the same creek, but that is another story.

Anyway, to say that I was excited about a new Indiana Jones movie is a huge understatement. Even though it seems like George Lucas has a personal vendetta against me and is trying to take a crap on every thing that I still love from my childhood I thought that Steven Spielberg would cancel him out. Anyway, there are some mild spoilers in the review so if you have not had a chance to see this yet you may want to skip this.

The movie starts off with Indiana Jones (if you do not know that this is Harrison Ford, I probably do not want you reading my blogs or knowing me personally anyway. He is the man, plain and simple. Even a bad Harrison Ford movie is usually awesome.) and "Mac" played by the always reliable Ray Winstone are in the clutches of a group of Russian soldiers lead by Col. Dr. Irina Spalko (I have read that many people in the blog o sphere do not care for Cate Blanchett as an actress because she "looks like she wants you to know that she is acting" and it has never made sense to me before. She is not only bad in this movie, she is terrible. Everything about her character was really stupid and I am pretty suppirsed that she would take on a role like this... )

Now, before I go any further I would guess that most of you know that the story involves aliens. When I first heard that, I was admittedly kind of bummed out. I have to say that the alien deal is the one part of the story that I actually thought was interesting. SPOILER The plot of this movie stated that the reason the ancient Mayan civilization was that they were actually an advanced race of extraterrestrials which sounds kind of dumb and awesome at the same time. I think if they had someone who had produced a decent script in the last 10 years or so, this could have been awesome.

I actually think that I am going to stop this right here as I have been trying to write this for a couple of weeks now and just can not make myself care enough to keep going. I will say that you should see this movie, even though I hated it. I think my problem is that I went in hoping to be blown away like I was when I was a kid and instead I left the theater feeling empty. If this movie was just a Indiana Jones clone, I would probably like it more.

6/10