LONDON: There was no small amount of trepidation among fans when Disney confirmed they were working on a fifth Indiana Jones film. After all, everyone was pretty excited about 2008’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” before the pulpy, UFO-riddled disappointment that followed.
Well, the good news is that Indy’s last hurrah — or, at least, Harrison Ford’s last involvement in the franchise — is not as bad as “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” The bad news is that it isn’t anything like as good as the original 1980s trilogy either, despite furiously leaning into the nostalgia fans have for the whip-cracking archaeologist and his relic-chasing, temple-hopping adventures.
“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” sees the titular hero on the verge of retirement, quietly winding down into a life of obscurity, before his goddaughter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) pays him a visit, dragging Indy back into the hunt for Archimedes' Dial — a MacGuffin with the power to alter human history which Indy and Helena’s father had recovered decades earlier. Also in the hunt for the dial is Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a former Nazi now working for the US government, who has his own reasons to hate Jones.
“The Dial of Destiny” has all the elements of a great “Indiana Jones” movie, it really does. It has some hectic set pieces, a globe-trotting plot, a slightly supernatural quest and a heap of neat nods to Indy’s previous exploits. What’s more, it’s got Harrison Ford on scintillatingly grizzled form, making you feel every punch, kick and gunshot wound as he hauls the beloved hero through the wringer once again. Even some of the ropier special effects and clumsy dialogue are forgivable when you’ve got such an iconic star playing a character he clearly loves.
What’s harder to forgive is the heavy-handed silliness of the plot, some horrible de-aging effects, an overreliance on spectacle over substance — one of the reasons we all love Indy is he’s a believably fallible action hero — and some flip-flopping character turns that feel at odds with the Indiana Jones we’ve come to know. There’s enough to like for this to still be a good movie. It’s just a shame it hasn’t given Indy the curtain call fans would have hoped for.
