(courtesy IMP Awards)
The meek, the Bible opines, shall inherit the Earth, but after the riotously fun and religiously-laden delights of 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, you might wonder whether the titular character doesn’t have a better than average chance of taking that inheritance as his own.
Five years after the release of The Temple of Doom (ToD), but only three years in actual Indy time – ToD is set in 1935 while The Last Crusade is set in 1938, precipitously close to the start of the Second World War – the third instalment in the Indiana Jones features many of the trademarks of the films to date.
Beginning with, and quite literally in a 1912 scene in which Indy, a 16-year-old with staunch ideas about items belonging in museums and not in the hands of avaricious collectors, seizes, or tries to seize a cross by the Spanish conquistador Coronado back from grave robbers, one of the classic chases that have come to be associated with the Spielberg-Lucas franchise.
There’s a vivacity to a classic Indy chase that fuels the gung-ho sense of adventurism that underpins this Boys’ Own, ’50s movie serial series which is absolutely exhilarating to watch and which makes you feel like you are right there with our Nazi-thumping “It belongs in a museum!” every step of his harassed and bloodily attacked way.
Whether it’s a Junior Indy racing across the desert landscape of his childhood home state of Utah and then up, down and over a moving train full of snakes and other circus animals – it’s here we see how Indy developed his ophidiophobia (fear of snakes) and yes, he has reason to no longer like them all that much – or our fedora-wearing hero trying to outrace a Nazi tank and out out-punch a supercilious Nazi officer before they reach a fairly unforgiving cliff in the middle of Jordan, the chase is always on in an Indiana Jones film and The Last Crusade gives us some absolute beauties.
But what would a chase scene be if there also wasn’t some trademark goofy visuals woven into their frenetically fun DNA?
Not quite as entertaining, that’s what.
So, while Indy and his dad, played with scholarly research about the Holy Grail is more important than his son chutzpah by Sean Connery – he thinks he was a great dad by being thoroughly disengaged; his son, you won’t be surprised to learn, disagrees – are doing their best to outfly a couple of Nazi warplanes after they’ve bailed from a Zeppelin, as you do, in a light plane, and barely getting away with it, we are treated to the undeniably mirth-inducing scene of a wingless plane, surrounded by flickeringly menacing flames, sliding along a mountain road tunnel right next to Indy and his dad in their car.
It’s all very deadly, race-for-your life kind of stuff but it’s also ridiculously funny, as is the moment when, after sending the Nazi tank over the cliff with the Aryan psycho officer onboard, Indy’s dad Henry, his college colleague Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) and Indy’s erstwhile helper out in the field Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) are staring over into the deserty abyss, mourning the fact that, as far as they can tell, Indy is dead too, not having bailed in time.
Indy, of course, of battered but alive and well and crawls up with laborious effort some way along from them, and noticing them all looking morosely down, joins them to see what they’re staring at, until of course, they see him and the chase resumes with Henry admonishing his then-collapsed and exhausted son for just lying around.
Like its two predecessors, The Last Crusade beautifully weaves these moments of buoyant levity into a some very serious narrative-building, ensuring that though Indy has some damn intense things to deal with, that there’s also a swashbuckling bit of fun to be had too.
And lordy we need those light and bright visual gags, whether it’s flaming tires cartwheeling past everyone or some Star Wars-like blowing up on enemy pursuers – not giggly fun true but incredibly enjoyable to watch – because at the end of the day there are very serious threads running through The Last Crusade.
The first is the narrative mainstay, a race to get to the Holy Grail which, like much of Indy lore, comes shrouded in intriguing tales of 14th-century knights and battles between good and evil and hidden tombs that point the way to where the Christian artefact of immense power might lie.
Indy isn’t so much after that as he after his dad, for whom pursuit of the Grail is his life’s work, all written down in a notebook that the Nazis want very badly and which keeps changing hands with a merry hilarity that belies how much the competing parties want to keep it out of each other’s hands.
The Grail naturally bestows the power of eternal life and so certain Nazi stooges, and revealing gives away a major plot point so not spoilers here, are after it and if there’s one thing Indy can’t abide, besides artefacts not being in museums, it’s letting Nazis get away with evil, nasty things.
And, naturally, you don’t battle with the Nazis on a whim or with minimal consequence, or come out unscathed although this being an Indiana Jones film, events do conspire to hand the victory to the good guys (no surprises there; what’s a swashbuckling adventure if good does not triumph over insidiously fascistic evil?)
But the other thread running through the possibly world-changing events is the restoration of a relationship of the fraught relationship between father and son; Indy is finally on the same grand adventure as his dad, though not by choice and a few close calls remind them both that they really do love each other.
Not in some drearily twee or overtly sentimental way but while the bad guys, and one very duplicitous woman, are trying to bust things apart, The Last Crusade is bringing two estranged people back together, giving the film a light heartfelt touch that works nicely in the overall scheme of things.
Joining the first three films in the franchise with an admirably consistent tone, style and sense of storytelling brio, The Last Crusade is a rollicking romp through good escapist adventuring with some fairly weighty narrative impacts and emotional issues to work out that manages to adroitly and entertainingly mix some intense storyline punctuation points with some intimately emotional moments that together make for a perfect jaunt into the kind of adventuring fun where good triumphs over evil, mythology becomes real and the world, which, let’s face it, need a lot of rescuing is saved once again!