George Lucas launched his second blockbuster franchise with the pulpy stylings of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Indiana Jones adventures gave American cinema its own answer to the James Bond movies. Harrison Ford’s ice-cool charisma made Indy an instant icon and Steven Spielberg’s old-school direction of the action scenes – utilizing mostly practical stunt work – kept them lively and engaging.
Arguably the finest follow-up to Raiders is 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. For their triumphant trilogy closer, Lucas and Spielberg pushed the boat out (and into the propellor of a larger ship) with the action. From the young Indy prologue to the tank chase, Last Crusade is filled with thrilling set-pieces.
Reintroducing Grown-Up Indy
After the prologue detailing a young Indiana Jones’ origin story, Last Crusade flashes forward to adult Indy, contrasted against his younger self. This cut tells audiences that Indy is still the same plucky adventurer putting himself in danger to protect artifacts that belong in a museum.
In the pouring rain on a ship off the coast of Portugal, Indy fights the same gang of grave robbers for the same pilfered cross. It’s a great fight scene – especially with the extra stakes of towering waves threatening to sink the ship – but it’s not as inventive or unconventional as the opening set-piece. Still, this scene perfectly reintroduces Ford’s grown-up Indy.
The Grail Temple Collapses
The finale of Last Crusade is surprisingly action-free. After the climactic thrills of the tank chase, the threequel takes a cerebral turn as Indy faces various puzzles and optical illusions on his way into the temple that houses the Grail. The courageous archeologist has to “choose wisely” to pick the right ancient supernatural chalice. Indy fills the Grail with holy water and takes it outside to heal his father’s gunshot wound, where Elsa defies the knight’s wishes and tries to take the Grail with her.
When she crosses the Great Seal, the temple starts to collapse. She lunges into a bottomless pit to try to retrieve the Grail and falls to her death through a cloud of mist. Indy himself very nearly succumbs to the same temptation that cost Elsa her life, but his father inspires him to let the Grail go and they ride off into the sunset in what would’ve been the perfect conclusion of the Indiana Jones series.
The Motorcycle Chase
Indy’s plan to spring his dad from a Nazi castle doesn’t exactly go off without a hitch. They’re both captured, tied to chairs, and accidentally set the room on fire. They stumble across a secret doorway into a room full of gun-toting German officers and eventually manage to escape on a motorcycle.
But they’re not out of the woods yet. Before they can make their escape, the Joneses are relentlessly pursued by Nazi bikers. Indy outruns these motorcyclists, despite being burdened with a big, awkward sidecar containing his bickering father.
The Venice Boat Chase
The first act of Last Crusade has a real lull when Indy goes to a library, stumbles upon an X-marks-the-spot cliché, and descends into the catacombs to find hints to the Holy Grail’s whereabouts. The dullness of this sequence is redeemed when Indy returns to the surface and gets into a speedboat chase with some assassins sworn to protect the Grail’s location.
Achieved using practical speedboat stunts, this sequence is a typically engaging Indy set-piece. The speedboats desperately try to make it through the narrowing gap between two giant ocean liners, and at the scene’s climax, Indy interrogates one of the assassins against the spinning rotors of a much larger ship’s propellor.
Escape From The Zeppelin
When Indy and his dad sneak aboard a Zeppelin in disguise, they get rumbled by Vogel. They manage to escape in a biplane, but they’re chased by another biplane, leading to a thrilling dogfight sequence. Henry, Sr. accidentally shoots out the tailfin and tries to play it off as a casualty of war: “We’ve been hit!”
The older Jones redeems himself after their crash landing. While the enemy plane circles back around to pick them off on the beach, Henry, Sr. shoos away a flock of seagulls with his umbrella. The birds fly directly into the Nazi’s cockpit, causing him to crash. This is one of the crucial junctures that brings the estranged father-son pairing closer together, as Indy is impressed by his dad’s quick thinking.
Young Indy
The opening sequence of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade sees young Indy, played uncannily by River Phoenix, riding horseback through a canyon on a Boy Scout trip. He breaks away from the group to foil a band of grave robbers and they chase him to a circus train, where he acquires his whip, his fear of snakes, and the scar on Harrison Ford’s chin.
Not only is this a thrilling set-piece to kickstart the movie’s action; it’s a perfect origin story for Indy. The late, great Phoenix deftly blends Ford’s recognizable charms with bumbling, youthful inexperience. Indy faces new challenges at every turn and begins to show glimmers of the quick-witted explorer he’ll grow up to be.
The Tank Chase
The sequence at the temple where the Grail is housed is relatively low-key compared to the climactic action scene aboard the Nazis’ tank. After Colonel Vogel has captured Indy’s father and one of his closest academic colleagues, the badass archeologist rides a horse up to the tank, jumps aboard, and fights through the S.S. troops to save them.
As Indy is beaten over the edge of the tank and hangs from his satchel while being dragged through crumbling rock, this becomes Last Crusade’s hardest-hitting set-piece. Indy’s eventual victory is both triumphant and earned.