"Snakes -why did it have to be snakes?" says Harrison Ford, the embattled hero of Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark, shortly before jumping on to a floor full of them, writhing around the newly discovered Ark of the Covenant (resting place of the Ten Commandments). For he knows, as we know, that if it weren't snakes it would have been something else - a thicket of rotting corpses poisoned darts, poisoned dates, tarantulas, spilled oil on the point of igniting, or just an old-fashioned enemy with an old-fashioned gun.

Indeed, the audience is assailed just as much as the hero. Spielberg and editor Michael Kahn fling the action at us in a series of jagged jump-cuts, while on the soundtrack, in Dolby Stereo, the London Symphony Orchestra fiddle and blare their way through John Williams's grandiose music, overlaid with the sound effects of knives and guns hitting their targets, of crumbling underground temples, of exploding trucks and planes. This isn't the film for a quiet night out.

Instead, Spielberg and his executive producer George Lucas have aimed their entertainment at the child supposedly lurking in the hearts of all grown-ups, the child who can thrill at the spectacle of "the ultimate hero in the ultimate adventure" (to use the immodest words of the advertising poster).

Harrison Ford's Dr Indiana Jones is shaped in comic-strip terms: a bespectacled professor who has trouble spelling "neolithic'' at the blackboard, he transforms himself at will into a kind of global cowboy, doggedly pursuing the Ark's trail through Peruvian jungles, an improbable saloon bar in Nepal and the deserts around Cairo.

And as in all comic-strips the villains are easily identified and hated: they are Nazis (the time is 1936), searching on the Fuhrer's orders for the self-same ark, on the theory that it gives invincible power to its possessor.

Half-submerged in the film's relentless chain of action highlights lies a fascinating notion that plainly belongs to the world of George Lucas and Star Wars rather than the world of Steven Spielberg. Beloq, the French archaeologist employed by the Nazis, expresses it in a nutshell as the ark is towed away for inspection. "We are merely passing through history," he says. "This is history". For the sturdy object in gleaming gold proves to have powers and dimensions way beyond human comprehension: it has survived past world turmoils, it will survive the Third Reich; it even lies beyond the grasp of an "ultimate hero".

Herein lies the great disappointment of Raiders of the Lost Ark: Spielberg and his fictional characters conduct themselves as though they were really raiding something as boring as a horde of diamonds or assorted Inca treasure. The sense of awe the director effortlessly conjured up in the best parts of Close Encounters of the Third Kind is nowhere in evidence; instead, there are just the cat-and-mouse games of countless action movies and the kind of laborious mayhem that filled Spielberg's would-be comedy 1941. The end result seems more like an exercise in logistics than a piece of personal film-making.

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