Cate Blanchett, center, plays the villainous Irina Spalko, who dragoons Indy and his former flame Marion Ravenwood into her search for a mysterious lost city in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

David James

After 19 years away from the big screen it’s full-speed ahead for Harrison Ford and his alter ego, Indiana Jones, in Steven Spielberg’s rip-roaring adventure yarn Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

A lost ancient city in the jungle, Soviet spies, Stone Age warriors, man-eating ants, a flying saucer, a pit of sucking sand, river rapids, waterfalls, and an atom-bomb blast are all part of the thrills in a film that moves, moves, moves without letup. And if the many subplots sometimes collide and threaten to pull the movie in several directions at once, Ford paves the way with Indiana’s wry quips and fast moves that snap the action back on course.

There was a lot of speculation about whether the 65-year-old actor could pull off a series that he began 27 years ago. Yes he can. His aging face may not be as handsome as it once was. And he may not move quite as quickly. “It’s not as easy as it used to be,” Indiana says right up front. Writer David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, War of the Worlds) and Ford tackle the age issue head on from the start and Indiana’s 21-year-old sidekick Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf) calls him “Old Man” and “Grandpa” throughout the film.

But it’s not long before one gets sucked into this complex tale, set in 1957, as Soviet operative Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) and her crew kidnap Indiana and feverishly set the archaeologist to work at finding an ancient lost city, rumored to be the fabled El Dorado city of gold. Blanchett, done up in a page-boy hairdo and doing her best, very cool, Greta Garbo impersonation from Ninotchka, is the catalyst who puts the action into play.

Her team has already kidnapped Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen, reprising her star-making role from the first Indiana Jones outing, Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981) and is holding her in the jungle in hopes of finding that lost city and the elongated crystal skull that holds a magical secret. The plot is not all that dissimilar to Raiders. Substitute the crystal skull for the magically potent lost Ark of the Covenant (which makes a cameo appearance in this film) and Soviets for Nazis and you’ll have an idea of what’s going on. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull even takes us back to that warehouse full of crates where the Ark was left at the end of Raiders.

It references many other classic moments from famous films, too, some from Spielberg’s and producer George Lucas’ childhood movie favorites of the ’50s, some from Spielberg’s own movies.

One of the dandiest reference moments comes early in the film when Indiana finds himself at the epicenter of an about-to-go-off atomic bomb, an impressive piece of special effects pyrotechnics that recalls the government-produced scare films of the ’50s that showed the damage an A-bomb blast would wreak on a suburban town. There are also nods to the films The Naked Jungle (those man-eating red ants), Raiders of the Lost Ark (the Paramount logo at the beginning melts this time not into a similar mountain, but a prairie dog mound), Tarzan, Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, The African Queen, King Solomon’s Mines, Journey to the Center of the Earth and Spielberg’s own Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with alien creatures who look very much like his spaceship aliens in that film.

An especially thrilling sequence harks back to the careening one-man speed-racer flying motorcycles that zoomed through a dense forest in Return of the Jedi. This time a Soviet Jeep and an amphibious vehicle race side-by-side through a dense jungle, with Mutt straddling both machines as he and Irina battle with swords.

Mutt makes a formidable sidekick for Indiana, whether swinging through the jungle on vines like Tarzan or taking Indiana on a wild ride through the streets of New Haven around the Yale campus — and right into the library — on a motorcycle with KGB agents in hot pursuit. Mutt later proves more than a sidekick, a key ingredient in the plot.

Fortunately, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull pauses long enough to create characters and to build on those we’ve known for a long time. Allen is radiant as Marion, her face aglow soon after she meets up with Indiana, providing the knot to tie up the loose ends from the first film. LaBeouf makes a headstrong daredevil, but one who is willing to put aside his cockiness and listen to experience. Blanchett is more than the soul of cold evil for, in the end, we see how desperately eager she is for the knowledge of the universe.

But it’s Ford who really is the grease that makes these wheels spin as the snake-hating, whip-snapping Indiana Jones. He can pull himself out of impossible corners on the spur of the moment … and make it look easy.

*****Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Starring: Harrison Ford, Shia LaBeouf, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen, Ray Winstone, John Hurt, Jim Broadbent.

Rated: PG-13, contains violence, intense action, profanity.

mjanuson@projo.com