Why The Last Crusade Is The Best Indiana Jones Film

Why The Last Crusade Is The Best Indiana Jones Film,Harrison Ford's final Indiana Jones adventure of the original trilogy offers a funny, thoughtful father-son adventure with Sean Connery. Empire hails its worthiness.

Why The Last Crusade Is The Best Indiana Jones Film

Far be it from me to dig out my fellow Empire writers for their top Indy picks. But no Last Crusade? They chose… poorly.

Temple Of Doom has its charms, and Raiders is Raiders. (Crystal Skull is also a film.) The Last Crusade, though, is not just the most fun, but the most thoroughly Indiana Jones-y of the pentalogy. It’s a distillation of all of the things about the first two movies which made you giddy, but this time with the addition of Sean Connery killing Nazi fighter pilots by orchestrating bird-strikes. The Last Crusade is the Indy movie Steven Spielberg could only make having expanded his range with The Color Purple and Empire Of The Sun – it looks like a romp, but it’s richer, and fuller, and carries a lot of weight with a lot of grace. It also has time for Indy to do a comedy bit as a Scottish laird. The Last Crusade contains multitudes.

It’s the goofiest of the original trilogy by a distance. Indy’s – ahem – masterfully underplayed ‘Lord MacDonald’ character, for instance, which he uses to get a foot in the door of the Nazi schloss. He sounds less like a Scottish aristo than he does Jewish comedy legend Jackie Mason. (It’s not the only slippery accent on show here either – check Alexei Sayle’s suspiciously Scouse sultan.) And it’s a rare film which can get away with setting its heroes haring through the forest north of Salzburg before chancing on a wooden signpost pointing right to Venice (170 miles south) and left to Berlin (330 miles north) and absolutely nowhere else. Thanks, wooden signpost.

That goofiness is a reminder that no matter what dud Spielberg came into the project from, Indy was always there to bring him out of himself again. Raiders brought him back to life after 1941, and before The Last Crusade, he’d not had the kind of mega-blockbuster he was used to for a good chunk of the Eighties. Afterwards, though, he seemed to have his juice back. The campiness of The Last Crusade – Indy smushing his face into the tank periscope; the business with the spinning fireplace; the SS colonel Vogel screaming, “WO IST JONEZZZZ?” – unlocked something which had been trapped inside Spielberg since Temple Of Doom. I think he carried it with him afterwards. Certainly, in that animatronic rhino which nearly does for young Indy, you can see triceratops, tyrannosaurs and raptors as yet still trapped in amber.

It’s all offset by the very best action sequences of the whole Indy saga. There’s that River Phoenix-assisted prologue, a supremely-exciting, gag-packed origin story for Indy the Boy Scout. Over the course of one chase across the Utah plains and onto a circus freight train he picks up all his iconography: the whip; the fear of snakes; the chin scar; the terminally useless sidekick. (That sweaty boy with the bugle would, at least, have been more use in a clinch than dear old Marcus Brody. Bless him.) And the sequence in the desert – in which Indy tries to free his dad and Brody from a tank – is, for my money, the most relentless, get-a-load-of-this Spielberg wizardry in the Indy canon. He mines every single inch of that tank for any fun that might be had, turning the tracks into deadly conveyor belts while Indy gets garrotted with chains, as inside Jones Sr and Brody effect an extremely inept jailbreak. It keeps finding new levels too: Don’t get crushed by the wall! Look out for the cliff, Indy!

It’s a miniature masterpiece, with a shattering coda. As the tank crashes into the valley below, Jones Sr realises he’s lost his son all over again. “I just wasn’t ready Marcus,” he says. “Five minutes would have been enough.” The wind blows across the clifftop. Indy staggers over, and after one of the great double-takes of Connery’s career, Jones Sr launches himself at his son. “I thought I’d lost you, boy!” It’s a gorgeous moment, an example of what makes The Last Crusade so precious. Connery and Ford are the megawatt star attractions here, and their curmudgeonly odd couple dynamic charges the Grail search along. But slowly, they realise their resentment comes from their grief after Indy’s mother’s death. Indy got angry; his dad lost himself in the studies which his wife had devoted herself to as a means of keeping her alive.

It’s only right that the original trilogy gets the most tense, most thoughtful, most Jonesian finale possible at the temple of the Holy Grail itself: our hero facing not one but three booby traps, each testing Indy’s grudging, uncertain faith in the impossible a little more. He dodges the circular saws – Kneel before God! Then, um, do a big roly-poly before God! – and just about remembers his Hebrew-Latin translations, before taking a leap of faith onto the invisible bridge. After meeting the legendary third brother from the grail myth (“You are strangely dressed, for a knight”), our greasy Nazi tagalong chugs from the Champions League trophy and bursts nightmarishly into dust. Indy dodges a load of gaudy pots and plates – pretty sure the Sports Personality Of The Year Award is in there somewhere – and sips from the actual Grail.

I think we forget that while Indy’s on the trail of some more Christian bric-a-brac, he’s on a totally different quest this time around. Keeping the Ark of the Covenant out of Nazi hands in Raiders was about preventing them building an unbeatable army. Nice one Indy. But the Holy Grail is far more of a spiritual quest. The Grail is, as Brody points out, “the search for the pine in all of us”. It’s not a wrathful Old Testament God that Indy’s looking for, but the far cuddlier New Testament power of Christ to forgive. That’s what Indy and his dad both want, to forgive and be forgiven: Jones Sr wants to forgive his son for not being the academic he wanted him to be, and to be forgiven for pushing him away; Jones Jr wants to forgive his dad for all the things we all want to forgive our dads for, and to be forgiven for pushing out on his own. They both want the Grail, and after Elsa slips into what I’m going to assume is the very bowels of the Earth when she reaches for it, Indy can just get his fingertips to it. He has it: the thing which is going to scrub away all those decades of resentment. But his dad knows better.

“Indiana,” his dad calls to him, firmly but warmly. “Let it go.”

The Last Crusade understands what it’s searching for far better than the other Indy movies. The Ark of the Covenant is a fascist-melting mystery. The Sankara Stones work just fine. (We’ll gloss over the Crystal Skulls.) The Holy Grail gives Indy the opportunity to live forever; instead he decides to spend his one life getting to know his dad a little better. It’s the polar opposite of that smart but, ultimately, slightly cynical ending to Raiders. The mighty, terrifying Ark is filed away never to be seen or opened again (well, until Crystal Skull), but the modest cup they leave behind in that cavern changes the Jones boys for good. They learn not everything should be put in a museum, and that some things simply need to be let go of – before riding off into the sunset. Perfect.