Finding the fountain of youth might have served as a better excuse for Indiana Jones’s newest adventure; that’s certainly what the filmmakers were after. Harrison Ford is once again donning his famous hat and whip, and in almost every way Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is nothing more than a tired retread—a shameless guarantor of financial success.

If this movie had shared the inspired freshness or quality that immortalized the first three, perhaps the dollar signs that drove it wouldn’t have been so offensive. But Steven Spielberg and George Lucas only offer us a hodgepodge of what had been successful in the past. First, there’s the casting of Shia LaBoeuf as Indy’s (surprise!) son. LaBoeuf—who had yet to be born when the first two Indiana Jones films were released—is the height of safe, commercial filmmaking. He’s a geekily harmless light comedian, late of the closest modern equivalent to the old-Hollywood assembly-line mentality: the Disney Channel. One has the lowest of expectations when a Michael Bay puts him in a movie version of Transformers, but one might hope that better-respected entertainers like Spielberg and Lucas would try a little harder to find a new talent; they have bank accounts big enough for them to take such risks. Unfortunately, the force of the new-trilogy Star Wars mindset is still with them. Why cancel out LaBoeuf’s wan charm by casting him as the exact opposite of what he is: the rebellious young Marlon Brando of The Wild One? Shia LaBoeuf as an anti-establishment type is as absurd as John McCain as a maverick (currently, maybe not formerly). Of course, his “rebelliousness” is limited to a owning a motorcycle, affected speech, and knife-twirling. His character only looks like Brando’s; it’s a caricature plucked from the ’50s pop mythology of Back to the Future and American Graffiti, a mythology which Lucas initiated in the first place.

The rest of the players are similarly wasted—particularly John Hurt, used only because his British accent makes the epigrams delivered by his whacked-out professor seem more enigmatic. Cate Blanchett plays a Soviet villainess who is the Nazi villainess of The Last Crusade with a different accent. However, Karen Allen reprises her role from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and when she and Harrison Ford—as Indy—fight, there’s a snappy charm that echoes the earlier pictures favorably. Ford actually keeps the movie alive; always self-aware and ironic throughout the series, he doubles his efforts here. He delivers his lines as though smiling from the side of his mouth; and the fact that he implicitly agrees with us that the film is an absurd venture is enough to transcend our condescension. For all of the hype, we know that this film is utterly routine.

All of this is not to say that if one found the first three movies enjoyable, one will not be entertained by this one. It’s incredibly hackneyed, spelled-out entertainment, but Spielberg’s craftsmanship flows even when the audience is bucking against misplaced political commentary, computer-generated monkey helpers (read: Ewoks), and sickening reverence to Sean Connery’s now-dead Jones, Sr., which, I suppose, is meant to correlate with the bonehead revelation that LaBoeuf’s character is Indy’s son. (Rather than pillaging exclusively from his own and Spielberg’s work, Lucas borrows the father-son dynamic from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.)

When the film’s cautious self-importance is toned down and Spielberg and Lucas decide to play—as when Indy stumbles over mannequins in a mock-suburban home at a nuclear test site or a villain is enveloped by ants—the movie becomes entertaining in a way that doesn’t insult one’s memory or intelligence. But the film suffers the same folly as other resurrected movie series like Star Wars and The Godfather (both of which were renewed after a 16-year lapse, which is still three years short of the distance between The Last Crusade and The Crystal Skull): What constituted as originality in the earlier films is reduced to hollow mannerisms. It’s bland and a cheat to clone said mannerisms, but it’s something of a betrayal to do a heavy-duty overhaul. Lucas and Spielberg have put themselves in an insuperable position, and their only non-monetary rationale may have been to spew the same implicit message of the earlier movies, this time blurted out more tritely than ever: Knowledge is treasure. (The non-profit Edutopia, which Lucas magnanimously founded, expresses that ideal in the real world. These guys certainly put their money where their mouths are; but, in this case, their money is much more expressive.)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is marginal entertainment traded for big bucks, Hollywood’s gameplan for this summer—trying to suck blood out of a corpse.