WHEN Raiders Of The Lost Ark came out in 1981, the trio of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford were forever etched onto the annals of cinema as an unstoppable force.
In Lucas they had the visionary, in Spielberg the perfect story-teller and with Harrison's rugged good looks and dead-pan charisma, they virtually had a licence to print massive wads of money.
They did. Three fantastic times. And then had the good sense to call it a day before their fedora-wearing golden goose started to lay rotten eggs.
But now the year is 2008 and it begs the question: When did these former box-office heavyweights actually do anything GOOD in the last decade? Or even a little bit DECENT?
Worse still, after the final death of the Star Wars prequel franchise, the thought of Lucas getting his bearded mitts on another childhood treasure seems about as welcome as a vicious snake bite.
So on paper a new Indiana Jones movie seems like forcing a healthy, if elderly, giant out of a dignified retirement and making it do tricks, to the obvious detriment of its health.
Yet that's unfair. Because although the legs on this franchise are a little worn and the exercise does genuinely seem pointless, there is clearly life in this old dog yet.
Not a great big flash, mind. But certainly a glimmer.
Return
Ford returns, good value as ever in the role of Professor Henry "Indiana" Jones Jr. Time has moved on, with Indy ready to retire as professor at the height of the commie-fearing 1950s.
The belt is a little looser, the shoes more comfortable, the jowls certainly more grizzled and that famous hatband – and pretty much everywhere else in fact – is now a lot sweatier.
This ‘new' adventure is another portion of the old serials that Spielberg and Lucas triumphantly reintroduced into the popular culture.
And therefore this film basically reads as homage to their homage.
The idea is that Jones, working for US intelligence, discovers a fiendish Russian plot to locate a highly classified but apparently undissected alien corpse.
Here Jones confronts his new foe, a Russian ice queen called Irina, played by eerily sexily by Cate Blanchett, who uses the time-honoured technique of putting a "y" before every vowel.
"You wiyill tyell mye ayall Amyerica's syecryets!"
With a black bob hairpiece, fetchingly tailored military fatigues and sexy boots, this Russkie babe wants to get her kinky claws on a mythic crystal skull perhaps belonging to some alien visitor.
And if reintroduced into its last resting place in the tomb of a legendary pre-Mayan civilisation deep in the South American jungle, it will give the Kremlin mystical power over the west.
Yes, it's one of those films.
Chase
So the chase is on, followed by another, then another, then another and another.
The great man is aided by a new young sidekick called Mutt (Shia LaBeouf), who arrives modelling Marlon Brando's biker look, presumably waiting for Wham! a few years too early.
The annoyingly over-acting and archetypical sulky LaBeouf takes over some of Indy's derring-do responsibilities, but thankfully not all of them by any means.
There is also Jones's unreliable Brit pal Mac, played by Ray Winstone, who has to shout "Jonesy!" in his cockney-tones a lot, while John Hurt plays a befuddled professor called Oxley.
It seems sad though that the legendary Hurt, playing someone so obviously old and senile, appears only in shot to make Ford look youngish in comparison.
A tall order for any actor.
It's good to see Karen Allen back as Indiana's first, and feistiest, love.
When I think of the Indiana Jones movies now, the single glorious moment is that superb visual gag pitting the swordsman against the gunman-the winner being all too obvious.
It was a brilliant joke, and it chimed with Indiana Jones's paradoxical modernity: the gun beats the sword, of course it does, duh!
Despite harking back to a golden age, the Jones franchise was thrillingly modern and new.
We'd never seen such stunts, such action, blended so effortlessly with self-deprecatory humour.
But since then, everyone else has been ripping off the act.
Rip-offs
While Ford has been away, we've had National Treasure, Sahara, The Mummy and The Da Vinci Code all tapping into the archaeologist-come-action hero market.
So when we see lost tombs, great grinding stone walls, sand waterfalls and gigantic underground shrines swivelling into new positions like enormous occult machines-well, the thrill is gone.
Plus the treasures themselves look as if they are going to be on the Antiques Roadshow.
Similarly, the CGI elements in this movie seem absurdly pointless and detract somewhat from the real stunts which made the first three films so utterly beguiling.
A computer generated LaBeouf swinging through the computer generated trees may put a few more female bums on seats, but it's the REAL stunts that get the BIG laughs.
There is one moment of the old Spielberg magic.
Jones finds himself alone on a nuclear test site with just 10 seconds to go before annihilation.
Desperately, he knocks on the door of a house, but finds the only occupants are lifesize mannequins: the whole community is a fake, constructed by the US government to assess the effect of a nuclear blast on civilians.
To see Indiana Jones alone in this chilling ghost town, desperately improvising a shelter from the explosion, is a tremendous moment, satirical and surreal.
As for much of the rest-well, let's hope this really is the Last Crusade.
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