'Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny' PEOPLE REVIEW: Indy's Last Hurrah Starts Slow, Finishes Strong
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Harrison Ford's fifth adventure in the franchise costars Phoebe Waller-Bridge
© Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection
Admirably stoic and unfussy, Harrison Ford has played Indiana Jones for more than 40 years—running, riding, jumping and tumbling this way and that, up and down as the physically challenging role demanded. If he hadn’t been a Hollywood star he could have been a battle-scarred Norse legend—Beowulf with a fedora.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the fifth and final film in this astonishingly successful franchise, starts with a long, clunky and somewhat dull prologue that’s also a bit of a bait-and-switch. We’re back in World War II Europe: Young Indy (Ford, de-aged with great skill) has been captured by the Nazis and foiled in his attempt to keep Hitler from getting hold of a legendary artifact, the Lance of Longinus. But there’s a second object of antiquity in play, a device that could upend world history (no one in an Indiana Jones movie is ever itching to discover something as insignificant as a painting from Picasso’s lost "purple" phase). Created by the Greek mathematician Archimedes, this mythical doohickey is a dial with wheels as meticulously engineered as those in a modern watch. It would have required an enormous Swatch band!
At any rate, Indy escapes, and the dial becomes the engine of a 2 hour, 20-plus minute film that alternately ambles and races to its conclusion, with John Williams’s brassy theme blaring out from time to time like a strategically administered dose of Viagra.
The story jumps forward to 1969. Indie is now more rumpled and taciturn than ever, living in a messy, ugly Manhattan apartment that could have been rented to Richard Dreyfuss in an old Neil Simon rom-com. He’s still having to contend with that Greek thingie: His goddaughter Helena (Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge) wants to find it and make a fortune. So off they go!
Waller-Bridge is a brilliant talent, but she’s wrong here — she lacks the right cynical brassiness. It’s like casting Emma Thompson when you need Barbara Stanwyck. Okay, sure, that actress died in 1990, but who’s to say that digital magic and Archimedes’ genius couldn’t resurrect her? Meanwhile, the movie squanders Antonio Banderas in a tiny role and under-utilizes Mads Mikkelsen in a bigger one: Voller, Indy’s Nazi rival for the disc. Then again, Mikkelsen doesn’t necessarily have the hammy vitality to capitalize on a role like this. His performances tend to be immaculately precise, as if the emotions were measured by pipette.
Related: The Cast of the 'Indiana Jones' Movies: Where Are They Now?
The movie delivers some satisfying if unsurprising action sequences — the customary boobytrapped tomb — before suddenly springing to thrilling life in its concluding third. There have been grumblings online that this final twist, which is both crazy and inspired, isn't too far off from shark-jumping, but that’s scarcely fair: Let's not forget that Raiders of the Lost Ark reconfigured the Ark of the Covenant as a nuclear device.
Even as time itself spins on its invisible axis, Ford always seems completely sane. That may have been key to this whole franchise. Imagine if it had starred Jack Nicholson.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is now playing in theaters.
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