Marty Michaels

From the leather jacket to the whip and the fedora, there’s no doubt that when it comes to being awesome, Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones, Junior has a monopoly on badassery. So in celebration of possibly the greatest movie character of all time, let’s take a looksee at his top ten finest moments. Onward!

10. “You lost today, kid.”

It’s not often you get to witness the Birth of a Legend, but in the opening scenes of Last Crusade, you get to do just that. On a scouting adventure, the teenage Indy starts his career in archaology by attemepting to recover the Cross of Coronado from some thieves and take it to it’s rightful place in a museum. Along the way he picks up his whip, the scar on his chin, his pathalogical fear of snakes as well as his trademark fedora.

9. Guess who’s coming to dinner?

Or; the scene that made me unable to watch Temple of Doom all the way through until I was 15. Most things that freaked you out in your youth don’t seem so bad when you look back at them, but this scene is still disgusting. Disgusting and oh so awesome. Indy and his friends are in India and are invited to a feast consisting of some monkey brains, eyeball soup and, best of all, a huge fucking snakes stuffed with what look like eels. Tasty!

8. WhooooOOOOOOOoooooooOOOOOOOaaaaaah!

Some films claim to be a “rollercoaster ride,” but few can say that they feature a literal rollercoaster ride in the final reels. After doing his Indy thang in the Temple of Doom, Dr. Jones and co. jump into a handy mine cart and take off down a cave that can be best described as the asshole of hell. Avoiding zinging bullets, holes in the track and gravity defying leaps, Indy cheats death as only Indy can.

7. “No ticket.”

Quick, you have to think fast! You’re stowed away on a Nazi zeppelin and a Nazi has recognised you! Do you:
a. Give up and let him capture you
b. Run away
c. Punch him and throw him the fuck out of the airship
If you chose option C. you just might have what it takes to pull on a fedora and be an intrepid adventurer. Indy’s methods of problem solving are inventive to say the least, but if you ever run into him on a Nazi zeppelin, here’s a handy tip: as long as you have a ticket, you should be fine.

6. Going down.

Ok, so here’s the scenario. Indy’s in the middle of a rope bridge with enemies on either side. They’re closing in rapidly and it’s at least 100 feet to the crocodile infested river below. You don’t have your gun, but you do have a rather wicked looking sword. What do you do? Whilst anyone else on earth would hold their hands up and say “it’s a fair cop,” our intrepid friend Indy says “fuck it” and surprises the hell out of everyone by showing his rock of Gilbralter sized balls and cutting the rope bridge in half and hoping to Christ he can hold on.

5. “Asps… very dangerous!”

As mentioned in number ten, Indy has a bit of a thing about snakes. He doesn’t like them. So when he’s faced with the snake pit that is the Well of Souls in Raiders, he’s really up shit creek. Being made of win like he is, he goes anyway and comes face to face with the most badass snake of all time. After openly shitting his pants, he collects himself, gets up and maintains, getting on with the job in hand. That, my friends, is how you deal with shit. You get up and you maintain. Everything you need to know about being an man, you can learn from Indiana Jones.

4. Face meltingly awesome.

After being chased by boulders, fighting off both the Nazi and the Egyptian hoardes, facing his greatest fear in the Well of Souls, stowing away on Nazi u-boats and getting his hands on the Ark of the Covenant, Indy caps off the greatest adventure movie ever made not by winning an epic fight or by blowing something up in dramatic slow-mo, but by being chained to a post and closing his eyes. Indy’s arch nemesis and his Nazi cohorts open the Ark and get utterly pwned as all manner of demons and devils fly out of the Ark and set about melting some fucking faces.

3. Tanks but no tanks.

Hot on the trail of the Holy Grail and desperate to beat the Nazis to the Valley of the Crescent Moon, Indy fights his way out of a tank where he’s being held captive and jumps on the nearest horse. It’s horse vs tank as Indy and his new best friend take down the tanks one by one, most notably by making one of the guns backfire by jamming a rock down the barrell. At the end of the scene, Indy seems to go over the edge of a cliff whilst trapped in one of the tanks, leading to a really great moment where his dad and his friends think he’s dead only to discover him, quite alive, looking down at the wreckage of the tank with them. One of the greatest action scenes ever shot (there’s action in the tank, on the tank, outside the tank, shit blows up, shit goes over cliffs, there’s thrills, spills and laughs) and topped with an awesome emotional moment.

2. Jones. Indiana Jones.

Every movie, regardless of plot or cast, should start the same way as Raiders. As far as character introductions go Harrison Ford’s big reveal is up there with Sean Connery in Dr. No, Orson Welles in The Third Man and Boris Karloff in Frankenstein. But what follows is even better. Indy and his guide make their way past various booby traps to find a Hovito fertility idol. Indy’s guide double crosses Indy and makes off with the idol only to get pinned to a wall by a big ass spike. Indy reclaims his prize and is, in the single greatest moment of action in the Indy movies, is chased by a giant fucking boulder down a long fucking corridor and leaps for freedom only to be persuded by a bunch of pissed off Hovitos. Running like the wind away from their spears and blow darts, Indy swings Tarzan-like on a vine into a river where his pilot Jock (or is it Jaques?) waits with a biplane. The music swells as the plane takes off into the sunset and the best adventure movie ever made is underway.

1. swishswishswishswishswishBANG.

There’s a scene in The Untouchables where Sean Connery talks about how silly it is to bring a knife to a gunfight. Sage advice that the swordsman hired by the Nazis to take out Indy in Cairo would’ve been wise to have heeded. After a long and awesome fight around the marketplaces of Cairo, Indy comes face to face with a huge figure clad in black and weilding a very large and very deadly sword. He passes it from hand to hand and swings it about, inviting Indy to take him on. Indy wipes the sweat from his brow and in the greatest moment in the Indy series pulls his gun and shoots the motherfucker dead. Later in the movie, Indy admits that he doesn’t have a plan to get the Ark and is making it up as he goes, and nothing exemplifies that more than the shooting of the swordsman. It’s almost as if his instinct to fight kicked in and he was running on adrenaline while he was beating up the other thugs but only when he got a moment to pause and think did it occur to him that hey, he has a fucking gun. Referenced in everything from Temple of Doom to Tomb Raider, Indy vs the Cairo Swordsman is everything that is great about Indiana Jones in one 30 second scene.

It’s interesting to note that no one of these moments came from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. What does that tell us? Disagree and think Mutt Williams swinging on the vines should’ve made the list? Comment below. Then kill yourself. End transmission.

Tags: indiana jones, movies, top ten