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Here's your hat, Indy, but, really, what's your hurry? Because 19 years after the Last Crusade that clearly wasn't, and 15 years after the old man joined Young Indiana Jones on the small screen to recount his glory days blowing horns with Sidney Bechet, it's almost unfathomable that this hoary mishmash is the best that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg could cough up.

Have we learned nothing about disturbing dusty relics and mussing with primordial remains? These only lead to trouble—melted faces, some crazy dude sticking his fist in your chest, and, well, more melting faces. This time, though, an even worse fate lies ahead for trampling trespassers: National Treasure by way of The X-Files, only not as pleasurable as so dreadful a coupling would suggest. Bury thyself, Dr. Jones, and pray no one disturbs the corpse in this or any other millennium.

From humdrum start to shrugging finish, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull bears almost no resemblance to its three predecessors: It's absent the spark and spirit of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the grown-up menace and slapdash comedy of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and the loose-limbed effervescence and emotional jolts of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It's hard to tell whether Spielberg and Lucas are trying too hard or trying at all—the thing's such a mess, such an unmitigated disaster, that damned is the scholar stuck with the unfortunate task of deciphering this cynical, clinical gibberish in decades to come.

Much has been made of Lucas and Spielberg, and a cadre of screenwriters (including the solely credited David Koepp), pushing the franchise into the late 1950s—away from the Nazis and biblical collectors' items and toward the Russians and ETs. Early word suggested a film verging on summer camp, as creaky ol' Indy (Harrison Ford, looking not a day over 62) donned fedora and whip and Cate Blanchett slipped into dominatrix bob-cut bangs and borscht-scented accent for some outer-space trip flavored with the era's grade-Z conventions, just as the first films proffered yellowed pulp cliffhangers and widescreen smirks. But Crystal Skull is no fun at all—not for a single second, not even accidentally. Not even with Shia LaBeouf terribly miscast as Marlon Brando as the Wild One. (The Mild One? Sure, fine.)

The dialogue's drab when not absolutely dumb; the actors seem lost if not outright listless; the scant action sequences appear to have been filmed entirely in front of green screens, suggesting a movie shot during breaks from lunch catered in a studio boss's office. (Is anyone sure producer Lucas didn't actually direct?) And the storyline's a bunch of convoluted mumbo and pointless jumbo having to do with Russians and mind control and the mythical golden South American city of El Dorado, which, according to The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, may have been constructed by "visitors" who taught the locals how to, um, farm. Twenty years between offerings, and this is all that the A-team could come up with? Close Encounters of the Turd Kind?