I thought the "X-Files" movie came out later this summer ... : "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"

Look, I really want to see "The Dark Knight." But the prospect of battling crowds and being elbow-to-elbow with the masses on opening weekend ranked up there with trying on a barbed-wire thong dipped in Texas Pete hot sauce.

So I took the opportunity late Friday night to see a movie that has been out for a while and -- better yet -- was at a theater that wasn't showing the batcapades. And boy, it was obvious what wasn't showing. I counted maybe six other cars in the parking lot, and the theater staff were so disinterested that they didn't bother to clean my theater between shows. Nothing like shelling out $9 and seeing drink cups and popcorn bags littered all over the seats. Classy.

Of course, you may wonder what took me so long to see the latest adventure of our favorite whip cracker. The short answer: I wasn't really looking forward to the new "Indiana Jones," and the reviews -- while OK -- didn't change my mind. In the end, I figured it was probably worth seeing on the big screen, and maybe I'd find my way there eventually.

Why so blase, Jeff? Isn't "Raiders of the Lost Ark" your favorite movie of all time? Yep. But you know what? It's been 27 years since that came out. Twenty. Seven. Hell, it's been almost 20 since "Last Crusade." I mean, I was fine with the franchise just going away. Actually, I thought it did. But nooooo ... they had to have one more go around, even though Harrison Ford is retirement age. Wow.

Our story catches up with the swashbuckling archaeologist in the 1950s, after the Germans have been vanquished and the Russians are the new bad guys. (Old to us, of course, but new in the Indyverse.) Turns out the Russians are collecting weird artifacts -- including some stored on U.S. soil -- and are especially hot for some crystal skull that a guy Indy knows (John Hurt) also was trying to track down.

After his own brush with the Russians and their dominatrix leader (Cate Blanchett), Indy is enlisted by some punk kid (Shia LaBeouf) to go find the skull. Why? Because the missing man was with the kid's mom, and mommy also has been snatched. Or something like that. So our heroes set off, bumping into past friends and flames while dodging Russians and native baddies in South America, the skull's home (on this planet, at least).

As stories go, it could be worse, I guess. True, I liked the mystical and biblical stuff from the older movies better, but OK ... I'll go along with ancient tribes and aliens and all that jazz. Hey, it's the '50s, and everyone was into that stuff then, right? Also, "Skull" looks just fine and doesn't drag at any one spot. Many other movies in the two-hour range have more lulls than we get here.

But there are problems. First, I can't say I cared about any of the characters. Fresh face LaBeouf could have been more annoying, yes, but neither his character nor his performance really made an impression. It doesn't take much imagination to see how this kid fits in, especially when Karen Allen -- Marion from the first movie -- turns up. Gee, that's not a running theme for Spielberg. But the whole thing comes off kind of hollow, and even feisty Marion doesn't shake things up very much.

Blanchett nails the Russian accent, but her role also is two-dimensional and more flash than substance. Maybe I expect to much from a villain, but she's merely OK. And c'mon ... it's Cate Blanchett! If you're going to have a great actress in the cast, give her something great to do! As for Ford, he looks in decent shape but never convinced me that he was really getting away with all this stuff. Nor did I find his so-called emotional ties with others very convincing.

The biggest flaw, though, is the action and special effects. There's some pretty cool stuff at the beginning that recalls the Jones of old. But the climax to that is rather ridiculous, even for a movie that traffics heavily in fantasy. Sadly, there would be more such episodes, with me thinking, "Um, no." Action sequences in the other movies might have been elaborate, but I don't think they were outlandish. Here, however, we get no fewer than three or four cases that really went too far.

It also didn't help that Spielberg and Lucas brought CGI to the table. I guess you have to, in this day and age. But it didn't help and it made me think more of movies like "The Mummy" than the previous Indy installments. Wow, look at those ants! Hey, get a load of that big pyramid! Worst of all: We're not 20 minutes into the movie before we've had not one but two sightings of digital groundhogs. Yes, groundhogs. Forget stealing the Ark of the Covenant or Holy Grail. That sh*t right there deserves a thunderbolt from the big guy.