I had the opportunity to get away from my fatherly and husband duties this past weekend, so I made my way to the Alamo Drafthouse to catch the new Indiana Jones movie. I made sure to catch an early Saturday showing because if there's one movie that deserves the Saturday morning viewing experience, its Indiana Jones.

I hate to say it friends, but this was the Indiana Jones movie we'd all been dreading. Its heart breaking to have to break the news in such blunt terms, but this movie was just plain bad in nearly every possible way imagineable.

I place most of the blame on Mr. Spielberg. If there's one person impervious to G Lucas' more lame embellishments, its one Mr Spielberg. But he's completely sleep directing this one. The action scenes had no originality and were very by the numbers. The movie felt rushed and amateurish. This is his worst movie since his Jurassic Park sequel "The Lost World." ... Oh and that horrible movie about Hanks stuck in an airport terminal.

Even the usually brilliant John Williams felt like he was plugging themes into an already made movie.

Harrison Ford was good, but I felt his age took A LOT away from the movie. Its just not cool seeing a grandpa aged Harrison Ford trying to keep up in a movie like this. Even his uniform seemed out of place. It was like his clothes
were wearing him and not the other way around. That being said, we should all be so lucky as to be in as good of shape at the age of 60.

I absolutely hated the Maguffin (IJ sacred object) in this movie. No flying saucers in an Indiana Jones movie please.

Shia Lebouf was good and brought some much needed energy to the movie. Karen Allen was underused, but even so, you could tell she hadn't acted in nearly 20 years.

Some more gripes:

- CGI chipmunks???? Are you effing kidding me?

- TOO many one-liners. The other 3 movies had some of the all-time classic lines (making this up as I go along, don't call me junior), but every single line in this movie seemed to have been churned from a one-liner database.

- The nuclear bomb scene was cool until the highly...HIGHLY impossible escape in a FRIGGING refrigerator?!?!?!? Even supposing he'd survive the blast, he would not survive being thrown through the desert like a tin can.

- The movie wasn't violent enough. Where were the Nazi face melts? Where were the hearts getting ripped out of chests? How about seeing a line of Nazis getting shot by one bullet? Weird gripe, I know, but this is Indiana Jones we're talking about here.

- The movie lacked a good creepy crawly scene. The ants in this movie were largely CGI, so I never really felt interested in what I was seeing.

- The big action scene was sorely lacking in energy and creativity. It just pales in comparison to the big truck scene in the first movie, the tank scene from the third movie, and even the slave freeing scene from the second movie. The best action scene was the warehouse scene, but that was literally in the first five minutes of the movie.

I have other gripes, but why bother? If this movie hadn't been called Indiana Jones, I would have liked it more. But knowing how brilliant the first 3 movies were makes this movie all the more painful. I almost had to wonder if someone had "ghost directed" this movie on Spielberg's behalf.

This is the Spielberg equivalent of "Alien vs Predator," but its worse because you figure that he should have known better. So I have to also blame Lucas for pulling Spielberg away from his "important movie phase" in the first place.

I'll close with a sports analogy. This movie was Jordan returning to the NBA with the Wizards. The dunks were there. The tongue hanging out was there. The legacy was there. But the magic was gone. The Bulls years will remain untarnished, but you have to sit back and wonder "why?" he came back in the first place.