Quentin Tarantino is not just an iconoclastic filmmaker. He’s also an eccentric film watcher. He’s seen everything, and he has lots of unusual, sometimes surprising opinions about them. For instance, he loves Top Gun: Maverick just like everyone. But he also vastly prefers a certain franchise entry that very few like to one that most people adore.
The maybe-retiring auteur and noted feet fetishist made an appearance recently on the podcast ReelBlend, where he did what he often does: run his mouth about cinema. At one point, they wound up talking Indiana Jones movies, where he dropped two hot takes: the beloved threequel Last Crusade is bad and the despised fourquel Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not.
“I like Crystal Skull more than the Sean Connery one,” Tarantino said. “I don’t like the Sean Connery one. I don’t like [that] one at all. … That’s such a boring one. It’s boring! And he’s not an interesting character. The joke is made immediately. It’s like Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.”
For those not in the know, Tarantino was referring to a much-derided, little-remembered 1992 cop comedy in which Estelle Getty plays Sylvester Stallone’s mother, from a brief period in which the sometime Rambo tried his hand at jokes. (See also: Oscar.)
Is Tarantino wrong? Last Crusade is few people’s picks for the finest Indiana Jones romp, and maybe Crystal Skull — a big money-maker but often seen as a stepdown in the series — deserves a re-evaluation. It’s been 14 years. Maybe the guy who keep rewriting history in his movies is right and it’s time to revamp how he think about Indy films.
(Via IndieWire)