re: indy 4

Pretty good, but I'm here to give you my now customary "things that bugged me in an otherwise enjoyable product" list. Massive spoilers abound.

• Marion Ravenwood disappearing for five minutes in the jungle chase. She and Cate Blanchett found themselves on the the amphibious vehicle, staring each other down, and I thought there was going to be a chick fight, but instead it cuts to another part of the chase and Marion is gone from all cars for a couple minutes. Then, when the chase is nearly over, she's back driving the duckie. That annoyed me, but it's not exactly the first plot hole involving her in an Indy movie. Remember her "death" in Raiders? Switched baskets my ass. You can hear her screaming from inside the basket as they put it on the truck that immediately blows up. I hate it when movies have misdirection like that. Another example is when Will Smith sees Frank the mannequin in a new location in I Am Legend. When you first see Frank, his head clearly turns - making you think its a Zombie. Of course it's not a zombie, its Frank, you only thought it was a zombie because HIS DAMN HEAD TURNED 90 DEGREES. How presumptuous of me!
• I know all religions are real in the Indyverse (see the very effective voo doo doll and other clearly-working sorcery in Temple), but seeing the alien's - I'm sorry, "inter-dimensional being's" - head and the flying saucer was too much for me. Spielberg loves his aliens, but he really needed to keep it more ambiguous. It's not like we saw the ghost of Moses pop out of the Ark.
• The completely pointless street racing at the very beginning. I guess Spielberg was trying to set a 50's tone, but that tone would be set later on aplenty with the Greasers vs Socs rumble. Wouldn't it be better to show Indy first, so the movie is more "It's Indiana Jones... in 1957" and less "the 50's had Indy too." Does that makes sense? And what the hell were those kids doing in the middle of desert anyway? Area 51 isn't exactly just outta town.
  
• The Crystal Skulls as the movie MacGuffin. They're not a bad plot device (much better than the P.O.S. rock with three stripes on it in Temple), but was this really the best they could come up with in 20 years?
• The entire Mac character. Utterly and completely pointless. What did he bring to the movie? How did he advance the plot? Anything?
  
• Shia and the monkeys. I'm cool with the Mutt Williams character, but the whole swinging-through-the-jungles-with-monkeys was horrifically awful. It was silly but not funny, and there was no point to it.
  

Common complaints I'm actually OK with...

• "Indy is too old." This didn't bother me. Indy was born in 1899, so he'd be 58 in 1957, and and it's not like it's impossible to be athletic at that age. Plus, he drank from the Cup of Christ, that's gotta have some nice after-effects, going past the seal or not.
• "Marion looks so old." Jeebus man, she's a woman in her 50's, what do you expect.
• "A nuke, really?" I feel like this should be a major Jump-the-Shark moment, but I'm strangely OK with it. I mean, Indiana Jones survived a nuke. How cool is that.

And what the hell, things I really liked.

• Opening action sequence in the warehouse. Except the "damn, I thought that'd be closer" line.
• Seeing the Janitor from Scrubs as a 50's spook.
  
• Mutt and Indy on the bike action sequence. Except the very end, where the student asks Indy a question like he'd didn't just do a controlled slide in a motorcycle through half the library.
• Marcus Brody's statute.
  
• The jungle chase scene in general. Except Marion disappearing and the monkeys, as noted already.
• "Henry... Jones... Juniah."
  

All-in-all, a good movie. Raiders and Crusades are still miles better, but I actually put this one ahead of Temple, which I've never really liked.