It’s been a long time. More than forty years. But archaeologist/explorer Indiana Jones is still looking for antique treasures — and trying to keep them out of the hands of Nazis. That means Harrison Ford, at 80, is back with a fedora on his head and a whip in his hand.
In “Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny,” Ford searches for the Antikythera, a device created a couple thousand years ago by Archimedes. According to legend, it can find fissures in time. In other words, we have a new plot device — what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin — that exists merely to help string together action sequences, fights, and chases. They’re interrupted only occasionally by dialogue in which the characters explain what’s going on to each other. And us.
Unfortunately, much of the action that seemed cutting edge in the first few Indiana Jones movies now comes off as a little bit boring. We’ve been there and seen that. I attended a screening of the new “Mission: Impossible” the night before I saw this, and though I can’t review that one for you yet (it will be released July 12th), I will say that the Harrison Ford stunt scenes don’t work nearly as well as the ones Tom Cruise pulls off. It’s easy to compare them, because the two movies have nearly identical segments (e.g. a fight on top of a moving train, vehicles driven down long staircases). Also, we know Cruise does a lot of his own stunts. Ford may have done the same in 1981’s “Raiders Of The Lost Ark,” but he’s too long in the tooth to attempt them today.
“Indiana Jones and the Dial Of Destiny” begins in 1945, with a younger Jones and his colleague Basil (Toby Jones) trying to keep the Antikythera from falling into Hitler’s hands. Director James Mangold uses de-aging effects to make Ford look the way he did in the earlier movies, and it’s not badly done. Certainly better than when Martin Scorsese applied the same technology to Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in “The Irishman.” However, though Ford does credibly look younger, he still sounds like his 80-year-old self, which is a bit jarring.
But let’s not make this about age. After all, the score for “Dial Of Destiny” is by 91-year-old John Williams, who can still write heart-pumping music to complement the fast-moving goings-on — including the repeated use of the theme he wrote for the lead character more than four decades ago.
As the movie flashes forward to 1969, we meet Basil’s daughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who is Indy’s god-daughter. She is a treasure-hunter, too, but not because she cares about preserving pieces of history. She’s in it for the money. That sets up a moral dilemma versus Indy’s altruism. Waller-Bridge and Ford have good chemistry, which helps in both the dramatic and comedic moments, and Mads Mikkelsen is thoroughly convincing as the villain, a Nazi who wants to travel back in time.
There’s a lot of nostalgia at play in “Dial Of Destiny.” The first appearance of Indy’s fedora and whip actually got applause from the audience I saw it with. So did a couple of characters from his past who pop up. Helena even has a young sidekick, Teddy (Ethann Isidore), who fills the same purpose Ke Huy Quan did as Short Round in “Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom.”
In 2008, “Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull” was supposed to launch a new franchise with Shia LaBeouf as Indy’s son. “Dial Of Destiny” seems like an attempt to erase that character and story line from our memories, but it comes off as more of a repurposing of Indy’s greatest hits with nothing new to bolster the reputation of the character or the leading man. That may be the reason executive producer Steven Spielberg, who directed the previous four Jones outings, opted to hand off this finale to Mangold.
With a runtime of two hours and forty minutes, “Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny” feels too long. Like Helena, the movie forsakes the idea of preserving history in favor of squeezing more money out of the series. It may accomplish that, though I wonder how many moviegoers who weren’t alive when the series began will be interested in this latest installment. But I can only rate it a 5 out of 10.