KEY POINTS:
To hell with whether Harrison Ford is too old to play Indiana Jones. What really has me sweating like a movie villain this week is whether I'm too old to queue up and pay to see him play Indiana Jones one last time.
When Ford last wore the hat and whip - in 1989 for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - I was just north of 20, though I still had trouble buying a beer, so I probably looked like just another high school geek as I took my seat in the old Mid-City fleapit on Queen St.
Nearly 20 years on, the queuing and the paying is shaping up as just another of the humiliations of middle age: "One adult please ... No, no children."
Of course, all this talk of Ford being too creaky to play Hollywood's last real action hero is - to use a word Indy might appreciate - bunkum. Make that pure bunkum. When my generation first saw him in Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981 - and as teenagers, we were of course his target audience - he was teaching archaeology at Princeton and already looked pretty damned middle-aged to our young eyes.
But then he was supposed to.
Friends and fellow directors Steven Spielberg and George Lucas apparently conceived him as their James Bond. And Bond, from Connery to Craig, has always been as middle-aged as Miss Moneypenny.
Indy was conceived as pure nostalgia too, with the duo channelling the formulaic action serials that baby boomers queued to see every Saturday morning back in the 1950s. So big surprise: the Indy movies were, and remain, rollicking, formulaic, big-screen comic books.
Still none of that mattered to me back in 1981. I was there for Han Solo. He was Generation X's first really cool movie hero in our first really big movie experience, Star Wars. And arguably Ford, who let's be frank, has an acting style closely related to pine, has pretty much played him ever since - I'd still pay to see Han Solo do anything, even end up on a desert island with Anne Heche.
Then of course there were Raiders' Nazis. Movie Nazis have always been a special kind of evil (think trenchcoats, sabre scars and hilarious uniforms), and Raiders had particularly good, evil movie Nazis. Looking back, it was inevitable that Raiders would be pure Peruvian gold.
Of course the second and third in the franchise could never live up to the pure adrenalin rush of the first. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (actually set before Raiders) was two hours of confusion and Indy being constantly interrupted by an annoying kid and an awful Kate Capshaw (another genius Spielberg move: he married her, then never cast her again).
And, while the Last Crusade was a return to form (more Nazis!), it still felt a tad flabby and a little too middle-aged.
So how to approach the fourth and probably last of this piece of movie-making history? Update it to the Cold War and replace the Nazis of old with Soviet baddies led by the incomparable Cate Blanchett doing her best Stalin impersonation.
Maybe it's a sign the movie is trying too hard.
In the old Indy days, the villains were just villains - right up until their faces melted off in the big spooky finale. And then Indy rode into the sunset ... [cue theme music].
