Don't worry, Paramount. You’ll get the $400 million you’ll need at the box-office to recoup your investment in the latest Indiana Jones movie.

That’s a fairly safe bet after the premiere in Cannes, where even some of those with bona fide tickets couldn’t get in, having waited impatiently for 20 years to see a new edition. Admittedly the applause was muted at the end of two hours of high jinks from a hero of 65 wrapping himself around Steven Spielberg’s lavish production values and sometimes hairy special effects.

But this was no Da Vinci Code critical debacle. It may not be the freshest or the best of the series but the formula still works, still making us enjoy the absurdities which remind us of the cliffhanger Saturday morning serials upon which Spielberg based the first film in 1981. Strangely, after all the doubts, some of them his own, Ford, our now fairly ancient hero, who is several times referred to as such in the screenplay, is the most convincing character in the cast. Certainly more so than Cate Blanchett’s Irina Spalko, who is the Ruskie villain of the piece and has to behave a bit like a pantomime figure. At least she ensures that there’s not a nasty Muslim in sight to torment the world’s most indestructible archaeologist. But then we are back in the Fifties with the plot, at a time when they were hardly invented.

No one manages to spout his or her lines with the same weary know-how as Ford who, if he really did most of his own stunts, is a very fit pensioner. The madcap action asks a lot of him, and he delivers. He escapes from a nuclear blast in a fridge, he falls down three giant waterfalls without even losing his hat and he beats up a large Soviet soldier with right and left hooks a much younger man would envy. There’s not much logic around but it’s all a sight for sore eyes.

Ray Winstone and teen idol Shia LaBeouf are treasure hunters who warn that the Russians are after a crystal skull that offers allembracing power. John Hurt is an ancient rival hunter and Karen Allen, the love interest in Raiders Of The Lost Ark, is back as the woman who can’t get her old flame off her mind. They all go to it with a will.

The film does most things asked of it with rumbustious enthusiasm, though it’s a pity an actor as good as Jim Broadbent has been relegated to a few amorphous lines at the end. But we can’t have everything, can we?