Drudge has been playing up the yawn of the drama of the fourth installment of Indiana Jones, which has a world premiere at Cannes tomorow.

Variety story here. The gist is that The Da Vinci Code, the last ludicrous would-be blockbuster that debuted at Cannes, was widely panned, and that director Steven Speilberg and producer George Lucas were doing whatever they could to avoid the same thing happening to their box office baby. The pair are playing their usual card, which is secrecy and inaccessibility; in the coming weeks we will see which panting journalistic lap dogs will get the exclusive behind-the-scenes access.

Variety:

“Indy’s” producers have skedded a “filmmakers party” for 250 people—no press invited. There will be the usual press conference following the screening; the only TV and print junket interviews with the cast are scheduled the day before the screening, instead of afterward; access to Spielberg outside the press conference is strictly interdit.

The trouble is that if the recent work of Spielberg is any guide—indeed, if the last Indiana Jones movie, released nearly twenty years ago, is any guide—the film will be a nice looking but intelligenceless cartoon. Like The Da Vinci Code, it has no business being at Cannes, but whatever. Indeed, plotwise, it will give cartoons a bad name, as the senseless plotting of The Last Crusade testified.

I tried to watch the thing again recently. Scene after scene made no sense. Jones is in a library, looking for an “X.” He sees it on the floor beneath his feet. It’s a brightly lit room, but he still has to go up a winding staircase, followed by an ostentatiously rising camera, to get a good look at the letter he was just standing on. He goes back downstairs—and the letter is suddenly barely visible.

He’s in a quiet library, so of course he picks up a large metal stand of some sort and smashes his way through the stone, which somehow doesn’t disturb anyone. He climbs down into a hole and find himself in waist-deep water, which he tastes and declares is petroleum. So he lights a torch!

Meanwhile, the bad guys appear and stomp down the metal staircase to the library, which is suddenly shaded. Indy’s cohort, Denholm Elliott, dutifully ignores them so they can hit him over the head and follow Indy down into the petroleum river, which is suddenly flammable.

Five minutes later, Jones is in Elliott’s hotel room in a bathrobe, having apparently just gotten out of the shower. He goes back to his room to find it had been torn apart, apparently silently, by some other mysterious bad guys, in the 90 seconds or so since he had left his room and wandered across the hall to Elliott’s.

He then goes over to his love interest’s room, which has been ransacked while she was in the bath as well. Since she’s aligned with the bad guys, why didn’t they just go over to Elliott’s room and pull a gun on the both of them?

Spielberg and Lucas could buy a good script if they wanted to; look what Jon Favreau did with Iron Man.

As Variety notes, the world has changed since the last Indy movie. Here’s a couple of samples from an early review posted on Ain’t It Cool News:

[…T]his is the Indiana Movie that you were dreading. I remember seeing the two trailers and though I was excited to see the old man in action again, I was kind of worried that they seemed to be missing ’something’. That something was tension. During the whole of the movie, there was not a single moment that I thought our hero Mr. Jones (actually Colonel Jones as he was a hero in WWII now) was in any sort of peril or even significant inconvenience. In most cases, you were so many steps ahead of the characters that it was really just an arduous wait for them to get through it.
[…]
Anyway, I don’t want to rant on forever, as it doesn’t matter what I say, you will see this movie regardless. And even though it’s not as bad as Allan Quartermane [sic], it’s definitely not a good Indy Movie. But for those of you that feel that the new Star Wars Movies robbed your childhood, expect some molestations from Uncles’ George and Steven…

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