I Hate Indiana Jones: Day 38

Day 38: Indiana Jones and the Blase Secondary Protagonist

So Indy shouldn't have been able to find the graveyard, the appearance of the natives was kind of silly, and showing the entire fight scene from Indiana Jones' sidekick's perspective was an incredibly stupid move, but the most offense thing about the whole fight scene is Shia Laboeuf's reaction to it. Or really lack of reaction to it, I should say.

While the audience is well aware that fighting karate monkey death Indians is a fairly run-of-the-mill afternoon for for Indy, the entire experience pretty much has to be the most interesting thing that has ever happened to Shia Laboeuf, as well as the closest he's ever come to dying. Now, I'm sure he had a few close calls down at the garage, you know, what with cars falling off lifts and such. And there's every chance a few of those of malt shop dust-ups have gone pretty rowdy, but there's a pretty big difference between getting into that kind of trouble and having prehistoric kung fu style monsters shooting poison darts at you in a South American graveyard.

This is not a call for ultra-realism, or a suggestion that Laboeuf should've immediately started suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, it is however, a call for a little more logic in the way people behave. Just a little bit of fear for his life, and a little bit of a amazement at the fact that Harrison Ford just single-handedly murdered the poisonous zombies would have gone a long way towards humanizing the character. Whatever his experience with Harrison Ford was up until that point, it seems like having your life saved from crazy monsters should earn the old man a little bit more respect than he got.

So what does Laboeuf do instead of having an honest reaction? He sets up Indiana Jones with a straight man line, mentioning that he thought Jones was a teacher, allowing Jones to quip back that it's just 'part time'. That's funny at all, but it undercuts any chance for actual human emotion at the scene might have had.