"It's not the years, honey. It's the mileage." Indiana Jones was practically a pup in 1936 when he rattled off that line in Raiders of the Lost Ark. As Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull opens - 21 years afterwards, Indy time - it's pretty clear the odometer of our fedora-wearing hero has long since flipped.

Oh, sure, Indiana still has some significant vim in his vavoom. His fist packs the same wallop as always. But decades of constant adventure and peril wear down a guy. His hair has gone from brown to gray. His face is creased. His students no longer stamp "I love you" on their eyelids. And Austrian double agents have given way to Cold War Commies. You might think that, instead of spending his sabbaticals cracking whips and running from boulders, Dr. Jones might like time reading the afternoon paper and sipping Earl Grey.

Fat chance. Not with evil Communist interlopers kidnapping him and demanding he reveal what he was doing in Roswell, N.M., circa 1947. They haul him to a massive, and oddly familiar, warehouse in Nevada, piled to the rafters with crates. Then they demand he lead them to an odd metal box—containing an odd magnetic corpse—which he dug up years earlier.

Indy is less than cooperative. "Drop dead, comrade," he says. And, after a few fits and starts, he sparks a massive action sequence involving guns, swords, trucks, whips, chains, rocket backwash and—naturally—a nuclear explosion. And we haven't even mentioned crystal skulls, iPod-size ants, aliens, the lost city of El Dorado and one of the most awkward family reunions ever. 

:: Review
Indy has been around for a while, and has gathered a bit of wisdom through the years. He offers some of it to Mutt: 1) Fixing motorcycles for a living is fine as long as you truly love it, and 2) Stay in school so you don't have to fix motorcycles for a living. He follows his rooting for education with a call for a bit of balance in life, all good things.

That said, action/adventure violence is what Indiana Jones films are all about, and Crystal Skull doesn't let its predecessors go it alone. There are many, many, many bloody fistfights. And several grisly corpses are encountered, including the results of being eaten alive by ants.

Indiana Jones 4 is also about skulls - which thousands of years ago set up an outpost on Earth and taught the citizens of the ancient city of Akator (that's El Dorado to you and me) about irrigation, agriculture and perhaps even Google. These aliens apparently were psychic beings, and their long-dead skulls still retain some of those abilities. Legend has it that if anyone returns the missing skull to the city, he or she will be imbued with a gift of untold supernatural power. The skulls, implicitly, were worshipped as gods.

The Indiana Jones movies - in many ways archetypes of the modern action flick - are based, according to creator and producer George Lucas, on the cheap, fun serial movies of the 1930s and '40s. As such, they're not supposed to change your life: They're just supposed to be thrilling.

But a funny thing happened to the way to the theater. At least a couple of these supposed trifles surpassed their ambition and became not just adrenalin-laced actioners, but classic films, filled with passion and subtext and even touches of spiritual significance. Consider the scene in Raiders where Indy sees God's true power, even with his eyes tightly shut. Or consider The Last Crusade, in which Indy learns that our true treasures are those who walk with us, not objects we lust after. Sure, those films were a blast - and by this I'm not saying they avoided problems - but some had enough positive weight to stick with us a while.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is more in keeping with Lucas' original vision. It's sometimes fun, sometimes thrilling. It's as violent as you'd expect it to be. It has about as much profanity as you'd assume. The quintessential popcorn-muncher.

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