Indiana Jones would have a good time working alongside Phryne Fisher.
Their kindred spirit, figurative though it may be, shines through one more time in Miss Fisher and The Crypt of Tears, a crime thriller that becomes available Monday on Acorn TV.
Miss Fisher (Essie Davis, top) roams 1920s Australia doing what women were not supposed to do: solving crimes, often as a byproduct of a daring adventure.
The Crypt of Tears is a stand-alone mystery that can be enjoyed on its own, though it also serves as a continuation from three seasons of Miss Fisher TV dramas. Fans are hoping the film will be the bridge to a fourth season, though that has not yet been announced.
The feeling of Crypt will be familiar to all those fans. While the stories always rack up a body count, the homicides themselves are never graphic, and the tone surrounding them is – well, light would be overstating it, but certainly not dark. Miss Fisher is whimsical and often playful, though this doesn’t distract her from the intuitive sleuthing for which she has become a legend at the Adventuresses’ Club.
The Crypt of Tears takes Miss Fisher from Australia to London and Egypt, where the adventure begins with Miss Fisher rescuing Shirin Abbas (Izabella Yena), a young Egyptian woman who has been imprisoned for speaking out against the government and injustice.
That part of the mission is enlivened by action-adventure sequences like Miss Fisher and Abbas leaping from a bridge onto the top of a speeding train, then figuring out how to get inside the train before it runs through a narrow tunnel.
That’s the Indiana Jones element of the show, and it’s just as entertaining when women in 1920s dresses are racing to beat the clock.
Miss Fisher soon learns, however, that Abbas’ immediate predicament is rooted in a chain of questionable activities that involve important people and go back generations.
That’s what eventually leads us to the “crypt” part of the story, which involves an actual crypt. It’s fun to see how all our characters get there, so it remains entertaining even when it gets a little cartoonish.
Hey, Indiana Jones gets a little cartoonish, too.
Meantime, while she’s resolving centuries-old mysteries, Miss Fisher also continues her romantic dance with Detective Inspector Jack Robinson (Nathan Page, top).
He would vehemently deny it’s a romance since he insists it drives him crazy that she’s involved in his cases at all. But he’s lying. It’s not so much a “will they / won’t they” situation as a “will they ever?” Maybe not, because she’s having so much fun as it is. Her Crypt entrance scene alone, which we won’t spoil here, makes that point clear.
Lone female crime-solvers tend to be a tenacious bunch with a good sense of humor. Miss Fisher, whose TV persona is written by Deb Cox from the Kerry Greenwood novels, upholds that engaging tradition.