Indiana Jones gets less than a fitting farewell

ANYONE old enough to have watched all four previous Indiana Jones movies when they debuted would be stepping into the cinema this time with nostalgia and trepidation. There has not been an Indiana Jones film since 2008. And the franchise has gotten progressively sillier with each sequel. But, hey, after a 15-year hiatus, they must have come up with something that gives the legendary swashbuckler a fitting farewell, right? Right?

Star Wars found ways to gloriously reinvent itself when George Lucas stopped directing the films. The Scream franchise got so much better when Wes Craven passed the reins to younger directors. The Star Trek story world went for a radical reboot in 2009 and has since spawned six related TV series and counting.  

Indiana Jones should have gotten better with Steven Spielberg giving up the writer-director’s chair to James Mangold, who cut his teeth directing both serious dramas (Heavy, Walk The Line) and action movies with soul (Logan, 3:10 To Yuma). Alas, even Mangold couldn’t save Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny, the fifth and supposedly final entry in the Indy franchise.

Mangold is as competent as they come, so it can’t all be his fault. For a large part, it feels like the interference of studio executives who gave him a list of things to check off for the swansong. Hence the superfluous cameos of characters from previous films, the inclusion of a teenage boy to show Indy as a father figure all over again, and that search of a valuable artefact that turns out to have more magical properties than simply historical ones. The Nazis are also back as the villains, even though the main story is set in 1969, 24 years after the party dissolved. Once a crazy German nationalist, always a crazy German nationalist, it seems. 

Time-travelling thrills

The story opens with a thrilling 30-minute action sequence set in 1944 involving a younger Indy (a digitally de-aged Harrison Ford) trying to retrieve priceless artefacts from the Nazis. One of the artefacts – perhaps the most important one – is the titular Dial of Destiny, a time-travelling invention by ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. Indy naturally succeeds.

Fast forward 25 years later and Indy is an older, grizzlier, lonelier man (present-day Ford, now 81). The last film India Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull left him in a much happier place than he ever thought possible. (He marries his former sweetheart! He has an adventure-seeking son!) But this latest film is brutal in its depiction of getting older. Not only is he retiring from his job as a university professor, he is a semi-alcoholic separated from his wife because of family trauma. 

Everything seems to be going south until his god-daughter Helena “Wombat” Shaw (the perky, quick-witted Phoebe Waller-Bridge) joins him at the bar to remind him of the Dial of Destiny and its potential. When the two go to the university to check on the dial, they are set upon by former Nazi astrophysicist Jurgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) and his thugs who want to use the dial to travel back to the 1940s and change the course of World War II. 

Thus begins the very protracted adventure that takes the characters from Manhattan to Tangier to Athens to Sicily to stop Voller in his maniacal quest.  

Too fast, too furious

Indiana Jones was conceived in the late 1970s by Spielberg and Lucas as a tribute to the matinee adventure serials they loved as kids. When the first three films debuted in the 1980s before the age of computer-generated images (CGI), the lo-fi stunts wowed audiences and made the franchise one of the most successful of all time.

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But the nature of stunt work and spectacle has evolved tremendously, particularly with the influence of video games and superhero movies. And the latest Indy film shows an uneasy mix between old-fashioned stunts and CGI work amid the presumed need to keep the audience pumped up with non-stop action sequences. 

At some point, the two-and-a-half hours movie becomes exhausting as it hurtles from one action set piece to another, with very little connective tissue between them. The chases and gunfights become a big blur and cease to mean anything – no matter how much John Williams’ propulsive score tries to convince us otherwise.

At 81, Ford still has charisma but appears occasionally tired and disinterested. Waller-Bridge squeezes in whatever little humour she can to remind us that the earlier Indy movies thrived on being comedic too. But neither lead can save the movie from feeling like an extended, overwrought videogame – all action and very little relationship building.

Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny is now showing in cinemas nationwide.