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"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" -- guess who wins this fight?

SHORT VERSION: BASH! ZOOM! BOING? Yadda, yadda, yadda.

LONGER VERSION (warning: spoilers right and left!): Steven Spielberg has done it again.

That's the problem.

"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" goes boldly where it has gone before, so incredibly formulaic that you can pretty much call off the numbers as the set pieces dash past your eyes.

The return of the franchise has been panted over for months. After 19 years, it's good to see the brave archaeologist in the field again, trouncing the bad guys and saving the day. That's what we are paying for, and we get our money's worth.

So let's not judge the film against more mature-minded entertainments. Don't even hold it up against other Spielberg films. Or other Indiana Jones films. The 61-year-old director has proven time and again that he can make complex, challenging work and crap with equal facility.

That strength, his amazing skill, is also his weakness. "Crystal Skull" is an uneven saga that, for all its bravura moments, doesn't add up to much of anything -- but with the same Spielbergian glaze dolloped over everything. Given that the original "Raiders" was a pastiche of studio-era Hollywood style and ideas, "Skull" is a retread of a ripoff.

Armed with a story at least partly concocted by fellow film titan George Lucas, Indy stumbles into a plot that heads into the cockamamie at full speed. (Get out those old copies of "Chariots of the Gods?" and play along.) A graying Indy fights the Commies this time, racing to control the skull of an alien space being that evidently can control the minds of all mankind.

Still with me? Oh, and Indy has a long-lost son, the beefy and defensive Shia LeBeouf, who, frankly, looks a lot more like the long-lost son of Jon Favreau. Throw in the return of Indy's "Raiders" girlfriend Marion (Karen Allen), and the family is complete (Lucas' incessant father/son dynamic rears itself again).

High points: an opening donnybrook in a government warehouse and later a sword fight atop two speeding vehicles. At some point, though, the snap and intensity that makes an adventure film soar leaks out, leaving everyone going through their paces, even as the special effects ramp up, and the wow-finish whirls, collides and crashes.

Cate Blanchett is close to being a ton of fun as a slinky, sadistic Soviet spymaster, but her accent keeps slipping. John Hurt and Ray Winstone are wasted in supporting roles. Karen Allen is cheerfully inert.

Harrison Ford is not asked to do much acting here, and he spends most of the movie looking like a grumpy old man whose paperboy missed the porch again. Maybe if they had given him some moments to play, he would have played them. We'll never know.

But who cares? This movie will make a bazillion dollars. Spielberg and Co. have created more than a franchise, they've cobbled together an archetype, a character that will join Zorro, Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes and the like. Heck, I'd see it again. But wait ... I already have -- in 1981, and 1984, and 1989 ...