The boy is back in town.

Indiana Jones, the macho, whip-flinging archaeologist with the granite fists? Well, yes, him. Or Harrison Ford, 65, still rangy, still cool in a '30s fedora, still believable snapping a lash across a chasm and riding Tarzanlike from here to there while commies blast away? Yes, that one, too. Or what about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, director and writer-producer, who reinvented American cinema in the '70s and '80s by infusing it with a high-octane squirt of energy from such dead forms as '30s serials, swashbucklers, sci-fi and monster attacks combined with cutting-edge action and lacerating wit? Yes, they're back, too.

But the boy who's really back is our old friend, the hero.

That's the true pleasure of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." The movie celebrates this in loving, iconic shots of the man, his hat, his whip, in shadowy profile or as he soars through this or that obstacle course while John Williams's music, so full of the smell of popcorn and butter and Jujubes enameled to the ceiling of old movie palaces, instructs our respiratory systems to get with the program.

The movie, like its three predecessors, follows Jones (Ford) on a quest rooted in archaeological voodoo. Its plot is simply a series of quest contests between good Yanks and bad Russkies, first for an alien corpse in America, then for a crystal skull in Peru and finally for the site of the crystal skull, a magic city in Central America. The joinery between each segment is mostly chewing gum, baling wire and spit.

Almost on the template of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Crystal Skull" ends with an invocation of awesome power even as it connects with another '50s theme of paranoia in one of those grandiose special-effects sequences for which Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic shop is so well-known. Does it pay off? Maybe not quite, but the movie sends you out as it should, exhausted and happy, and you won't begin to think about its flaws for hours.

-- Stephen Hunter (May 22, 2008)

Contains mild violence and scary images.