Again – spoilers. Fairly warned be thee, says I.

Steven Spielberg only directed the first 30 minutes of the latest Indiana Jones film, that’s what I reckon. It was enjoyable enough but the plot was a mess and the dialogue forgettable, which is a bit of a killer for a series that trades on snappy exchanges almost as much as action sequences (you could take the tank and boat chases out of Last Crusade and it’d still be worth it for the father/son sniping – “How’d you know she was a Nazi?” “She talks in her sleep.”) The climax just seemed to be a game of ‘follow John Hurt as he bumbles his way through the puzzles, and if in doubt thrust the skull at whatever’s in the way’, and made no sense as far as I could tell. There was a whole ‘Indy as a suspected Red’ subplot that just popped its head round the door near the start and was resolved in the last five minutes, and the return of Marion was mostly wasted. And I just find it hard to believe that Spielberg directed that jungle chase – it’s all over the shop.

First 30 minutes though. Iconic introduction for Indy; Ark warehouse!; Spielbergian touches (you know – champagne glass shadows turning to tell you the blimp is going back to Germany) like the lamps pulling towards the crate; Indy gets the shit beat out of him; nice bit at the college and after with Jim Broadbent; decent intro for Share The Beef and a good motorbike chase. Then it all goes a bit funky, unfortunately, and the annoying thing is that you can almost see a really cracking Indiana Jones film trying to surface.

Still, Ford still does the business perfectly, and like Andrew says – Jim from Neighbours. I’m sure they only keep casting him in stuff to trigger that response in people.