There is no getting around it: "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" is shackled with the burden of unreasonable expectations.

Does it live up to them? How could it? The experience of watching "Crystal Skull" is similar to that of seeing the present-day Rolling Stones in concert. There's no question that the production is first-rate, the skill honed and professional and the principals are having a ball. But it'll never match the rag-tag excitement and originality of the old days.

Director Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas, the masterminds behind all the Indy movies (and so much more), acknowledge the build-up and attempt to cleverly mute it in the first frames of the film. Remember in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," when the mountain in the Paramount logo fades into an actual mountain?

In "Crystal Skull," it fades into ... the pile of dirt atop a prairie dog's home. Not quite a mountain to a molehill, but about as close as you can get.

This is not to say that there aren't chase scenes, fights involving unlikely properties of physics and all-around action galore (aliens, anyone?). It's to say that it's all tempered a bit, both by age (Harrison Ford is 65, though he certainly doesn't look it) and the off-the-charts anticipation for a franchise that hasn't seen a new chapter in 19 years.

While individual scenes and segments of "Crystal Skull" are quite entertaining and very well done, they add up to not so much an actual movie as a victory lap, a tip of the fedora by Spielberg, Lucas and Ford to the films that went before them. It's like a greatest-hits tour.

If you loved the first three movies — who didn't? — you'll smile warmly at the glimpse of the Lost Ark, for instance, a nice little callback. But you'll also likely groan at the predictability of the plot, on those occasions when the plot makes any sense at all.

The film begins with a rumpled Jones — like the audience, he, too, is 19 years older — captured and forced to help Soviet bad guys find the location of a certain box in the endless warehouse we saw at the end of Raiders.

Heh — not just bad guys. Bad girl, too: The main villain is Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), whose accent and haircut suggest that she wandered in off the set of a Bullwinkle cartoon, though that's not such a bad thing in a movie like this.

Spielberg goes a little overboard with the Indy's-older bit, but at least we're not meant to think he's still a young man — a point driven home plenty once he meets up with Mutt (Shia LaBeouf), who barrels into the film a dead ringer for Marlon Brando in "The Wild Ones." He's got news for Jones, who's under suspicion for helping Spalko, and it involves trouble for Professor Oxley (John Hurt), who helped raise Mutt.

Before long Indy and Mutt are traveling the world, looking for a crystal skull of lore which, if returned to its rightful resting place, will bestow its powers upon the person who takes it there.

Or something. Even for an Indiana Jones movie, it's a bit much. But trying to find it and then return it gives Spielberg all sorts of excuses to hatch over-the-top action sequences, the best of which — a sword fight between Mutt and Spalko while standing atop side-by-side jeeps barreling down jungle roads, for instance — invoke memories of Ford doing similarly crazy things at full throttle in the earlier films.

Along the way they run into Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), Indy's flame from the first film, who has lost none of her spunk. While you won't get any spoilers here, keep in mind that Spielberg likes to throw a little family drama into most of his films.

"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" plays heavily on the fondness of the audience for the first three films. Without that, it's basically a better-made version of the "National Treasure" series.

It doesn't mean that the audience can't enjoy it, just that it doesn't break enough new ground to carry the franchise further.

Bill Goodykoontz is chief film critic for Gannett News Service. Read his blog at www.goodyblog.azcentral.com.