"A pretty cool job..."

Male librarians have a new poster boy, Flynn Carsen, the central character in The Librarian: Quest for the Spear, a comedy adventure film produced by the TNT network in the United States, and now available here in Australia on DVD. Think of Carsen as a geeky, bookish Indiana Jones, and you'll have some idea of what this movie is like.

Carsen (Noah Wyle) is a 30 something perpetual American college student who holds 22 degrees in various disciplines. Eventually one of his professors kicks him out of college, telling him that he needs to leave the confines of academia and experience the real world. Carsen's doting mother, played by Olympia Dukakis, constantly encourages him to get a job, find a girl, and be happy.

Carsen receives a mysterious invitation for an interview at the Metropolitan Public Library. Shortly after Carsen's odd but successful interview, he is shown the true duties of his new job. He discovers that he has become part of a secret order of librarians that has existed for centuries. The purpose of his position is to safeguard historical and often magical artifacts in a secret section of the library. Some of the items Carsen is responsible for are The Ark of the Covenant, a unicorn, the Golden Goose, Pandora'’s Box, Excalibur, the original Mona Lisa, and the Spear of Destiny.

Carsen soon discovers that the job is a little more than he bargained for when one of three parts of the Spear of Destiny is stolen by the evil Serpent Brotherhood cult. Whoever has the complete Spear of Destiny will control the destiny of the entire world. The film follows Carsen as he attempts to locate the remaining two pieces of the Spear of Destiny, preventing the Serpent Brotherhood from possessing all three pieces.

Carsen heads through the Amazon rainforest and the Himalayas, ending up in the legendary Shangri-La with the help of adventurer Nicole Noone (Sonya Walger), a Library employee who blames herself for the death of the last librarian but who resists any friendly feelings for Carsen, at least initially. Carsen is the brains, and Noone is the brawn on their quest, which involves scrapes with waterfalls, headhunters, bridge collapses, and Mayan death traps, all the while evading the attempts of the Brotherhood to kill them both.

Fortunately, Carsen manages to save the world, defeat the Serpent Brotherhood, and prove his merit as the Librarian, while thanks to Nicole, also resolving the issue of his personal life. At the conclusion of his adventures, Flynn is moved to remark, "Being a librarian is actually a pretty cool job." While the adjective "cool" doesn't apply to most librarians, myself included, truer words have never been spoken.