Two decades after _The Last Crusade_, all the pieces finally fit back together for this long-awaited reunion between George Lucas, Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg. Tough to recapture the same old magic after so much time apart, but they actually manage to get it done... for a while. I can remember loathing this in the theater, avoided it for years on that merit, but my kids wanted to give it a try and I figured enough time had passed to give it another chance.

The first hour is, shockingly, rather painless. A carefree romp that, admittedly, isn't on par with its distant relatives, but at least it's in the ballpark. We've got era-appropriate villains (the traditional Nazis smartly replaced by Russkis to fit the cold war), deep dives through crypts and libraries, warehouses stuffed with artifacts, whip-slinging physical action... even crotchety old man Ford seems to be having a great time. Hell, I didn't even mind a peak-overexposure Shia Labeouf, vacantly kicking around the screen as a greaser tagalong. Yes, the [spoiler]infamous nuke-fridge[/spoiler] scene occurs during this part of the film, and it's still an eyeball-roller, but that's basically just a throwaway bit and the plot quickly moves to conceptually greener pastures. I found myself thinking, hey, maybe I was too harsh with that first watch.

Then we reach the jungle and the wheels come off. Practical effects give way to glaring CG. Themes shift from the mythical to the absurd. Credibility goes sailing out the window. I know what Lucas and Spielberg were thinking. This is a series that's been built around stretches of the truth, poking and prodding reality until it doesn't seem so outlandish to be literally chasing the holy grail. They wanted to stick to that concept, push the envelope just a bit farther, play with the cheekier sci-fi concepts popularized during the late '50s. But man, oh man, did they misjudge. Somewhere between the [spoiler]vine-swinging tarzan monkeys[/spoiler], the [spoiler]trans-dimensional space aliens[/spoiler], the [spoiler]man-eating insects[/spoiler], the [spoiler]moving-vehicle swordfight[/spoiler] and, yeah, that silly bit with [spoiler]the refrigerator[/spoiler], we shed our tenuous connection to the real world and lean into the ludicrous one. They've pressed their luck way too far, taken their audience out of the moment, and suddenly we've noticed the holes. _Crystal Skull_ might not be quite as thorough a stinker as I'd remembered, but it's still bad.