Spielberg & the gang return for an enjoyable but flawed adventure, writes Donald Clarke

TOWARDS the end of the belated fourth Indiana Jones romp, mad old John Hurt offers the audience an unexpected opportunity to muse upon the wretchedness of the human condition. "How much of human life is lost in waiting?" he ponders.

Good question. Whole empires have risen and declined in the 19 years since Indiana Jones, the archaeologist with a taste for adventure, last grasped his bullwhip and plunged into the jungle. Indeed, the anticipation has reached such furious levels that some fans have come to expect a little too much of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. (Let's just call it Skull from here on, shall we?)

After all, the Indiana Jones series was conceived as a tribute to a class of vintage movie pulp that cared little for structure, plot or motivation. These were the sorts of films you could enter halfway through and still have a good time. All Steven Spielberg and George Lucas - still, respectively, director and producer - promised was a healthy portion of outrageous chases, the odd romantic clinch and a smattering of witty quips.

On balance, Skull just about delivers on that contract. The opening 20 minutes are particularly zippy. It is 1957 and

a gang of Soviet spies, eager to locate artefacts from the supposed alien landing at Roswell, have kidnapped Indiana Jones and brought him to a government facility deep in the desert. The vast warehouse is, it seems, the one we remember from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but, upon his inevitable escape, Jones has no time to revisit earlier triumphs.

After finally evading the villains, he finds himself in what appears to be a perfect suburban house in a middle-class community. But there's no water in the taps and the inhabitants turn out to be dummies (literally). Jones has stumbled into a nuclear testing zone and - a challenge even for someone so superhumanly resourceful - he is forced to find a way of surviving the detonation of a hydrogen bomb.

Phew! Skull never quite regains the standard of its opening act, but there is cheap fun to be had throughout. Indiana encounters a young man (Shia LaBeouf) who persuades him to travel to South America in search of the lad's mother and an older mutual friend. It seems that the Commies have abducted the unfortunate couple during their continuing search for a crystal skull that will enable the people of the Eastern Bloc to become supermen.

During the ensuing mayhem we are offered swordfights, pursuit through hanging vines and, most satisfactorily, an attack by killer ants. There is also a revelation that will fail to surprise even the most inattentive of chimpanzees.

Despite all this furious activity,

it cannot be denied that there is something not quite right about Skull. The unhappy mutterings following the premiere at Cannes do have some basis.

One can have no reasonable complaints about the age of the protagonist. Following moderately successful recent outings by John McClane, Rocky Balboa and John Rambo, the aging, creaking hero had been satisfactorily established as an archetype for our times, and Harrison Ford, though no less woody than before, sighs and puffs with notable enthusiasm.

The problem has more to do

with the awful fussiness of the enterprise. There is far too much boring exposition throughout, and the overblown special effects in the final conflagration go from baroque to bizarre without passing through bewitching. Most troublingly, Spielberg and Lucas (for the first time in the series, setting the action in an era they can actually remember) have put too much pressure on writer David Koepp to incorporate contemporaneous icons and anxieties into the franchise's worn template.

LaBoeuf arrives dressed in Marlon Brando's costume from The Wild One. There is a little bit of McCarthyism in the opening act. Cate Blanchett's severe, sword- brandishing Russian villain appears to have stepped straight out of a James Bond novel. Whereas the earlier films wore their period detail lightly, Skull ends up looking like a promotional film for a 1950s theme park.

The tendency reaches total absurdity in the frequent sequences that attempt to blend the classic alien invasion movie with the franchise's familiar take on adventure serials of the 1930s. Steven and George, who know the original material better than anybody else, should be aware that the two genres just do not fit comfortably together.

Let's hope it's not another 19 years before we see the next episode. The notion of a blaxploitation Indiana Jones adventure is too grisly to contemplate.