I Hate Indiana Jones: Day 53

Day 53: Indiana Jones and the (far too) Lucky Escape (Part 3)

Today's entry covers yet another example of Indiana Jones' unbelievably convenient luck when it comes to finding his way to safety in even the direst of circumstances. This particular example comes from a sequence that I haven't mentioned as of yet in this series, the motorcycle chase around and through Barnett College, where Harrison Ford teaches when he's not off battling natives and punching Nazis.

I'll cover the details of the chase another day, for now I'll just recap the situation - Harrison Ford is hanging onto the back of Shia Laboeuf's bike as they ride through city streets and college gardens. The chase ends as Shia tricks the commies into ramming into the statue of Denholm Elliot, beheading it and sending the copper dome into one of the Commies' laps. Then the chase ends, and the scene cuts to Harrison Ford's house, as he and Shia go to look a few things up in books (the cornerstone of action filmmaking: always cut directly from a chase scene to a research scene!)

It's not the chase I'm objecting to here, it's the sudden resolution. the way the film seems to make the suggestion that, since the commies crashed into a statue, the threat must be over. Really? Why is that, exactly? The film explicitly demonstrates that the men in the car aren't killed. There's no shot of them being arrested by police, or detained by the anti-communist students who were marching at the time of the accident. As far as the audience can tell, they're up and around just moments after the crash.

After all, Harrison Ford walked away from an atomic explosion. How bad could a minor car crash have been?

So, again, let's put ourselves in Harrison Ford's shoes - he's just escaped from two commies, who he knows were out to kidnap, and possibly kill him. More to the point, though, he has no idea how many Commie agents are out looking for him - two are down (for a couple of minutes, anyways), but what kind of backup did they have? And if that backup existed, isn't it a bad idea to go back home without any kind of protection, really anything ranging from a police escort to a concealable revolver? After all, he's heading to basically the one place in America that the people who want to get him know they're likely to find him. Isn't that like walking into an ambush totally unprepared? When the Earps went to meet the Clantons at the OK Corral, they didn't leave their guns at the office*.

Luckily for him, there is no showdown at the Jones homestead, because the the Commies stopped existing the moment we moved onto the next scene.

Between this scene and the communists that were polite enough to not exist until the ant scene was over, Harrison sure gets a lot of existential breaks, doesn't he? It's rare that you get a character this dependant on the generosity of an editor to ensure his success, isn't it?

The only other character who even comes close is everyone ever played by Steven Seagal.

* (My Source: Tombstone, Wyatt Earp, and maybe fifteen other western movies and TV shows)