Variety reports that Shia LaBeouf is gearing up to fear snakes and get punched in the face by Nazis when he plays the son of Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones in the new movie that opens May 22, 2008.

My favorite LaBeouf performance is still when he played a little boy on The X-Files who needed a liver transplant and ended up getting some unlikely help from the world’s luckiest man, played by Sex and the City‘s Willie Garson.

Congratulations, Shia. Give ’em hell. It’s a huge responsibility, but I suspect you’ll bear it well.

The story is being kept secret and safe, but we do know the script was written by David Koepp, whose credits include Spider-Man, Jurassic Park, Stir of Echoes, War of the Worlds, The Paper (which is one of my own personal favorites) and Mission: Impossible.

I hope they make this one the old-fashioned way, with no computer effects. If it can’t be done with a real, practical special effect, then it shouldn’t be in the movie in the first place. I trust Spielberg. Lucas, not so much.