The Indiana Jones films were always inflated tributes to something else. They were inspired by the action-adventure matinees that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas grew up on. So despite having an 80-year-old Harrison Ford playing a rumpled Dr Jones in 1969, that the fifth film pays close homage to the original action-adventure trilogy is to be expected. It does that right from the film’s Nazi-thumping flashback prologue set in 1945 Germany, complete with a remarkable computer de-aged version of Ford.
The fifth Indiana Jones also pretty much forgets the terrible fourth, 2008′s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in which Spielberg attempted to give the series a sci-fi edge with a close encounter of the Amazon kind. That film was so forgettable that when in this, a doleful Jones briefly explains what happened to his son, it takes a while to remember that in the previous film, Shia LaBeouf played Mutt, the offspring Jones didn’t know he had with long-time love Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen). On the upside, at least this progeny of a beloved Ford character didn’t turn out to be the next Darth Vader.
Anyway, Dial of Destiny can’t really be faulted for feeling like a cover version of earlier incarnations. It’s a cover of a cover of a cover, really. It has booby-trapped crypts, writhing serpents in dark confines, roller-coaster tunnel chases up the wazoo.
But gosh – as performed by Jones, computer enhanced and otherwise, and conducted by James Mangold – it all adds up to a rousing, catchy tune.
As a film, Dial of Destiny, is, of course, a bingo card of everything that is seemingly wrong with Hollywood. Milking a once-beloved franchise beyond its natural life span? Co-opting young and formerly irreverent talent into the mainstream? Using technology to de-age old film stars, having not created any new film stars?
It’s certainly all that. The co-op-tee is Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who plays Jones’ goddaughter, whose archaeologist father, Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), was a chum of Indy’s in his Nazi-thumping days. Young independent Helen Shaw prefers her antiquities as liquid assets rather than museum pieces. But in her first big movie role, the Fleabag creator feels an odd fit, as Cate Blanchett’s cartoonish Soviet villain was in Crystal Skull.
There are moments when it feels as if Waller-Bridge is straining not to break the fourth wall à la Fleabag and shout “hot godfather” or something inappropriate. You can see her thinking it at least. Still, she’s certainly a presence, especially when she’s an equal participant in the film’s multiple overlong chase scenes. It seems Mangold’s previous film, Ford vs Ferrari, about the LeMans 24-hour race, convinced him all vehicular pursuits should last that long.
This, the longest film of the five, careers from the final days of Nazi Germany to 1969 New York, where a self-medicating Dr Jones is about to retire from lecturing bored students, before it’s off to North Africa, the Mediterranean and beyond.
It’s the “beyond” bit that just might confound long-time Indy fans who might prefer their hero remain a little more earthbound. The leap it takes is bolder than Crystal Skull’s but at least it’s in keeping with the Jones universe in a way the previous film wasn’t. Though as a prized artefact, that titular dial makes the ark of the covenant and the Last Crusade’s holy grail seem uncomplicated and plausible by comparison.
Going in pursuit of it as well as chasing Jones, Shaw and her young Algerian sidekick Teddy (Ethann Isidore) is Mads Mikkelsen as Jürgen Voller. He’s a German scientist doing what quite a few German scientists were doing for the US in 1969 and he makes for one of the series’ most hissable villains since Voller’s jackbooted countrymen of Indy parts I & III.
He also helps make it rather a lot of fun. Yes, Dial of Destiny winds on too long and it can feel like an archaeological dig into the best bits of the original trilogy. But watching the man in the fedora attempting to finally hang up his hat and have one last crack of the whip makes for a very good time at the movies.
Rating: ★★★★
Indiana Jones & The Dial of Destiny, directed by James Mangold, is in cinemas now.
