Buy It Now: Indiana Jones - The Adventure Collection (Special Editions of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark / Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom / Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade)

Dir. Steven Spielberg

Rating: 6.6  |  0 User Reviews  |  Send to Friend

By Piers Marchant

The Indy trilogy -- very soon to be a quadrilogy, if you haven't heard by now -- manages to point to the very worst-case scenario for sequels. Were I to score the films individually, it would work something like this:

The Raiders of the Lost Ark: 8.5
The Temple of Doom: 5.7
The Last Crusade: 5.5

The reason the first film is so good -- its confident appropriation of pulp films coupled with ridiculous-yet-believable set pieces -- is almost exactly why the other two failed so miserably. Simply put, co-creators Steven Spielberg and George Lucas didn't have the faith in their iconic archeologist hero to simply leave well enough alone. Each film, then, tags poor Indy (Harrison Ford) with a dreaded "side kick," be it Short Round (Ke Huy Quan), the obnoxious little kid he's paired with the "Doom"; or, worse yet, his father, Henry (Sean Connery, obviously), in "Crusade." Both characters were meant to stretch what was already known about Indy and broaden the horizons of the protagonist, but instead were tiresome and trite. Spielberg's track record with sequels isn't much to begin with (The Lost World, anyone?) and the subsequent Indy duds did little to dissuade that opinion. One can hope that the filmmakers have learned their lesson for this fourth installment, but with Shia LaBeouf on board as -- sigh -- Indy's son, the outlook certainly isn't good.

This special re-release offers a host of new features of the "behind the scenes" variety, in addition to further interviews with cast and crew and new intros from Spielberg and Lucas.

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