Elsewhere, Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has been likened to a "big dumb puppy." I can’t disagree — not that I even want to; this movie keeps pawing at you with cliches that are supposed to evoke the Indyjones worship of your youth. Hostile savages, the red menace, a hyperintuitive crazyman, a mystic artifact, a hotheaded greaser, an avuncular action icon (How he got to be an icon without pulling off any rad karate moves is beyond me), and his hat.

I wanted to like this movie. I really did.

I don’t have some unexplainable man-crush on Harrison Ford or anything, but I’ve got nothing against the guy. And the movie even had a MILF. But this puppy didn’t really have any new tricks to hold my interest.

What did I expect, really? Not sure. Like many people, my friend Pat came for the nostalgia factor, even buying one of those authentic leather Indiana Jones hats at Blockbuster.

I had no such childhood fascination with which to reconnect. Nor did I go back and study the original trilogy, like Pat did ("Remember, at the end of the one when he dropped the skull?" No. Was that important?). I just came to watch some foreigns get their asses kicked and their ancient monuments destroyed. And although that’s exactly what I got, the route there - taken literally and metaphorically through a series of chase scenes — left me feeling like I could have slept through it without missing anything. So yes, although I didn’t hate the movie, I am going to trash it. Mostly just because.

I simply can’t ever take Shia LaBeouwhatever seriously. His geeky self-effacement felt contrived and overdone in Transformers. In Indy he plays a greaser and he plays it a little too straight.

He rides a Harley. He fences with a sexy communist spy. His compulsive hair-combing is supposed to be somehow charming. His butterfly knife is edgy and badass. Like his personality, see? I’m pretty sure his leather jacket was even full of padding. Like his character, see? Earnest big dumb puppy. Maybe a few adventures in faraway, exotic lands will forge him into the type of charming, encyclopedic old man who’s ready to beat up foreigns at the drop of a hat.

Indy’s character can’t decide between avuncular confidence and smarmy condescension. When he wasn’t all "watch how it’s done kid," he was connecting some artifact to an ancient Sino-Teutonic-Martian-aquatic legend, which sort of made my eyes glaze over because those parts of the movie didn’t make any sense. Not that they were supposed to; the dialogue exists only to hypnotize us into demanding another big dumb puppy: the comically over-the-top chase/fight scenes.

And magical bugs always showed up at just the right time. In a jam? Nobody loves jam more than big red ants! Except maybe big dumb puppies.

I don’t know how faithfully this movie captured the feel of its predecessors. But I do believe that passing on the mantle to Shia LaBeouahmedinejad would probably leave a bad taste in my mouth. It would be like casting Tobey McGuire as Spider-man.

Oh.