Director: Steven Spielberg
Running time: 124 minutes

***

YOU want adventure? Thrills? How about man-eating ants? In Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, director Steven Spielberg capitalises on these and other basic needs. It's been 27 years since he first introduced the grouchily intrepid archaeologist, and it's a tribute to his classic status that Spielberg, Lucas and Harrison Ford still have deep reservoirs of goodwill on which to draw when Indiana and his fedora make their first entrance.

The last time we saw the whip-cracking professor, it was 1938, just before the Second World War. Now it's 1957, the world seems on the brink of nuclear destruction, and once again he has been nabbed by the armies of darkness. This time it's the Russians, led by Cate Blanchett with a bob so severe that you can hear Swing Out Sister weep with envy, and an accent so bad you can hear Ukraine bristle.

So, no Nazis but otherwise, as Indy says, it's "same old, same old" with the forces of evil chasing a powerful ancient artefact to guarantee global domination. The object of desire here is a crystal skull which variously opens secret doors, clears swarms of red ants, and scares hostile natives who have wandered in from the set of Apocalypto.

Over the years, numerous writers struggled with the script for this fourth adventure – among them M Night Shyamalan (who was mercifully reduced to creative paralysis by the task), Frank Darabont and Tom Stoppard. Eventually veteran writer David Koepp took over, and incorporated many ideas from the previous version, and yet the film still cries out for another rewrite to extinguish moments such as Shia LaBeouf asking if some creatures are from outer space. "Not outer space," Ford says gnomically. "But the space between spaces." I'm guessing George Lucas wrote that bit.

There's also a tidal wave of expository dialogue to surf (City of Gold! Mayans! Commies!) that flattens the film whenever it has to map out the plot.

Yet there's no lack of action in Crystal Skull, including an invigorating sword duel atop moving jeeps, and several scenes in which priceless, ancient artefacts get spectacularly trashed, reinforcing the belief that Jones is actually one of archaeology's biggest liabilities. But the movie shifts so fast in tone that it strips its gears: one moment it's Indiana stumbling across a bleak nuclear test site a minute before an A-bomb goes off; the next, it's slapstick comic relief reaction shots of computer-generated gophers. At times, Spielberg's talent for swift hyperbolic storytelling seems to stumble; the earlier pictures were essays in velocity.

The mood of Skull appears to be reunion, rather than a late franchise reinvention, and that includes the return of Indy's original flame Marion Ravenwood, played here with such gusto by Karen Allen that you wish she had something to do other than drive an amphibious truck and harangue Indy for chickening out of their wedding.

The film's chief innovation is her teenage son Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf), whose parentage is obvious to everyone apart from Indiana, and who frankly doesn't add to the fun, although he's not as annoying as Kate Capshaw in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom.

It doesn't help that he arrives like Marlon Brandon in The Wild One then goes on to display all the bad boy comportment of Mickey Rooney, but of course Shia's real role is as studio insurance in case a young audience no longer remembers Harrison Ford – although the studio must also be hoping the younger demographic have forgotten Shia's role in Transformers last summer.

Polished rather than ebullient, Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull still towers over Temple of Doom, and if its thrills feel a little dusty, maybe it's just that we will never again have the shock of this material seeming new. Now more than ever, Raiders of the Lost Ark seems a turning point in the cinema of escapist entertainment.

• On general release