Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: James Mangold
Starring: Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen, John Rhys-Davies, Antonio Banderas, Shaunette Renee Wilson, Thomas
Kretschmann, Toby Jones, Boyd Holbrook, Oliver Richters, Ethann
Isidore
Danny Glover was 39 when he first uttered his
Lethal Weapon catchphrase, "I'm getting too old for this
shit." 39! 39!! 39!!! That makes him practically an infant compared to
the stars of the 2023 summer blockbuster season. Pushing 60, Tom Cruise
is riding a motorbike off a giant Norwegian cliff. A 70-year-old Michael
Keaton is sucking in his stomach to squeeze into the leather batsuit one
more time. And an almost octogenarian Harrison Ford is once again
donning the hat and whip of one of his two signature roles.
15 years ago it seemed ridiculous that a sixty-something Ford could
return to the role of Indiana Jones for
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, yet here he is again. While he looks ridiculously good for his age,
this movie wisely leans into the fact that his best days are behind him.
Before that however we get to see a sprightly Jones courtesy of de-aging
techniques. A 1944-set prologue sees Indy and his latest fusty British
sidekick Basil (Toby Jones) battle Nazis on a speeding train to
get their hands on one half of "The Dial of Destiny," an instrument
devised by Archimedes that is said to have the power to manipulate time
and space. This sees them up against Jurgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a German scientist with a strong Danish accent.
25 years later, Indy is living in a cramped New York apartment teaching
history to bored students, while Voller is living it up in the city's
finest hotels, having been adopted by NASA and contributing heavily to
putting a man on the moon (such ironic injustice reminded me of that
scene in The French Connection where Roy Scheider's cop
stands in the pouring rain watching Fernando Rey's mobster eat a meal in
a plush restaurant). Voller isn't happy working for the Americans
however and has devised a plan to get his grubby mitts on both pieces of
the Dial of Destiny. In a clever spin on an oft-ruminated question
around time travel, Voller plans to kill Hitler, not as a baby but in
1939, which he considers the point at which the Fuhrer began to make
decisions that would ultimately lose the war for Germany.
This sees Indy team up with Basil's daughter (and Indy's goddaughter),
Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge - wait, as the daughter of Toby
Jones? Shh, just go with it!), who now uses the archaeological skills
she inherited to make a living selling relics on the black market. Such
an idea disgusts Indy of course, who believes such items should be on
display in museums (museums in the first world that is, not the
countries they're actually plundered from). There's something cheeky
about teaming Indy up with a character who is essentially Han Solo, and
Waller-Bridge brings a very British brand of roguish charisma to the
part. Refreshingly in this era of sexless cinema, her Helena is a
horndog with a cheeky Roger Moore Bond-esque remark for every hot guy
she sets her eyes on. Unfortunately she's accompanied by a Short
Round-esque Moroccan kid (Ethann Isidore), who while never quite
as annoying as these characters usually tend to be, just gets in the way
of the fun bickering between Ford and Waller-Bridge. Elsewhere the great
Antonio Banderas is wasted as a salty sea-dog,
Boyd Holbrook makes zero impact as Voller's lead henchman,
John Rhys-Davies dons brownface to return to the role of Sallah,
and Thomas Kretschmann plays, well he plays an evil German of
course.
It might seem unfair to compare James Mangold's helming of
action scenes here to those that have come before him, given how this is
a series that boasts some of the most well-directed set-pieces in cinema
history. But they really are poor. We know Mangold can pull off an
action scene (witness the finale of his
3:10 to Yuma remake), but the sequences here get lost in a
sea of digital sludge and incomprehensible geography. There's nothing as
bad as the jungle chase from Crystal Skull, but a weightless chase through the streets of Morocco (or a warehouse
in Burbank) gives it a run for its money. For my money, the series
jumped the shark in the final act of The Last Crusade. I have a metric I like to call the Ordet scale, which
measures how successfully a previously grounded movie can pull off a
fantastical turn in its closing act. The first two Indy movies pull it
off (Raiders of the Lost Ark spectacularly so), but every entry
since has gone too far. The ghost knight of
Last Crusade and the aliens of
Crystal Skull might as well be out of a Ken Loach movie
compared to where Dial of Destiny ends up in its
climax.
You have to ask yourself what do you look for in an Indiana Jones
movie? If your answer is adrenalin-pumping action then you're not going
to get much from this instalment. But if you're happy to see one of
Hollywood's great leading men return to an iconic role and embrace it in
a manner the grumpy Ford rarely seems to embrace anything, you'll get
something out of Mangold's film. Growing up in the '80s I was always
much more of a Star Wars kid than an Indy kid, but when
Ford returned to the role of Han Solo for
The Force Awakens
it just made me roll my eyes. Seeing him inhabit the role of Indiana
Jones made my eyes a little damp however. Ford never seemed all that
interested in playing Han Solo again, but throughout
The Dial of Destiny you get the sense that he's truly
relishing getting to play Indy one last time (surely). I suspect this
may be down to Mangold having the directorial sense to latch onto
something within Ford that Abrams was too naive to consider. Ford was an
action figure in The Force Awakens, but he's a human here. This means something to him, and even if
you're not an Indiana Jones fan it's hard not to be moved by seeing an
actor say goodbye to a role he has a long relationship with. That's
something AI will never be able to recreate. I had similar feelings
watching Michael Keaton in
The Flash, and I've never even seen his Batman movies. I guess there's just
something moving about the idea of young people making an old person
feel relevant again (for genuinely great examples of this, see
Ed Wood and Round Midnight, and hell, even Xanadu!). The Dial of Destiny probably isn't going to be a
crowd-pleaser, but it seems to have made one old man happy. That's good
enough for me.
