10 Movies That Peaked Way Too Early

10. Indiana Jones Nukes The Fridge

The film that brought the phrase €˜nuking the fridge€™ into the popular lexicon alongside €˜jumping the shark€™, the fourth, unbelievably delayed €“ nineteen (19) years! Nineteen! One-nine! €“ instalment in the Indiana Jones franchise kicked off really, really well. So well, in fact that the audience settled back, convinced that their fears had been for nothing€ this was going to be good. The opening sequence is everything you want from an Indie film €“ everything you want from this Indie film: action set pieces, wry humour all over the show, an acknowledgement of the incredible fallibility of our hero. More, though, Indiana Jones & The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull sets itself up through our nostalgia for the original trilogy. We grew up with these movies. We grew up with Indiana Jones. When that battered fedora gets thrown out of the truck and the unseen, equally battered figure picks it up and dusts it off; at that moment, several million people instantly regressed to childhood. It gets better, the opening scenes being set in the same warehouse that the Ark Of The Covenant was stored in at the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. The film even tries a brief shuffle of the cards to misdirect us: for two minutes, we actually think that the Russians are after the Ark itself. Great stuff. It€™s difficult to pinpoint where the film finally goes wrong the most. Some critics think it holds up right until the denouement reveals that we€™re dealing with aliens: greys, to be precise, of the Roswell/X-Files variety. Others can trace a long list of disappointing elements all the way through, a series of anti-climactic let downs beginning with that damn fridge. Others simply jump up and down screaming €œShia LaBeouf! Shia LaBeouf!€ like crazed howler monkeys. That opening gambit is perfectly judged, though.