Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) © Courtesy of Disney
Watching Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the urge to turn back time hasn’t been expressed with such full-throated desperation since Cher sang about doing just that. For this fifth instalment in the film series, 80-year-old Harrison Ford wears the fedora once more as the whip-cracking archaeologist and adventurer for a final hurrah.
The opening begins the time travel, taking us back to the end of the Second World War when a digitally-created youthful Ford gets among the Nazis to snatch away a treasure from under the nose of Mad Mikkelson’s wicked Jürgen Voller. There’s a chase on the roof of a train and – if you squint – everything feels like an Indiana Jones film. The John Williams score, the punches that sound like pistol shots, and Phedon Papamichael’s flaring cinematography are enough to melt the hardest heart, but with the action there’s also a CGI assisted weightlessness.
Fast forward to 1969 and Jones is a crushed figure: it’s now the mileage and the years, honey. Retiring from his University post, he is called upon by his goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who entangles him in an old obsession of her father’s, the retrieval of the Antikythera, an object made by Archimedes which can aid time travel. Voller – now a successful rocket scientist – wants the object for his nefarious reasons, aided by a grateful and naive American government. What ensues is a non-stop rip-roaring adventure – as an old ‘Saturday Matinee coming attractions’ preview might put it – that takes Indy via animated map to North Africa and environs and a series of encounters with different adversaries, complicated traps and an inexplicable Antonio Banderas.
James Mangold and his co-writers David Koepp and Jez and John-Henry Butterworth have some good ideas, mainly involving placing Indy in an unfamiliar time period, complete with Vietnam references, a Beatles song and moon landing euphoria. But once the action moves to the Mediterranean (exactly where is often unclear) the time difference evaporates, and we’re left with overfamiliar chase sequences all of which are five minutes too long and involve too many moving parts. There’s a simplicity missing here, and though faithful to the spirit of Spielberg, it’s the Spielberg of The Adventures of Tin-Tin (2011) rather than Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).
Waller-Bridge tries too hard, gamely leaping into the action and channelling a Barbara Stanwyck-style energy and wit but without her usual top-notch material. Conversely, Ford doesn’t have to try at all. It’s a suitably curmudgeonly thing to say, but you could take Ford’s performances from Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and Dial of Destiny and swap them around without anyone noticing. And he’s still the best thing in the film.
By the time an audaciously silly denouement is reached, everything has become so bafflingly pointless it’s hard to muster a gasp, or sigh. It’s painful to admit, but these last two Indiana Jones just don’t belong in a museum.
► Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is in UK cinemas now.