Midway through Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the bullwhip-wielding Ph.D.’s fifth and—we’re promised—final feature-length adventure, he pauses during a rock climb to catch his breath and catalog his decades of well-earned injuries. It’s a nice follow-up to a scene an hour earlier, when the film leaps from its 1944-set first act to 1969, signaling the passage of a generation with a lingering shirtless shot of its 80-year-old star, Harrison Ford, as he heroically … rouses himself from a nap.
Of course he looks hale for a man born the same year as our president was. But the moment is no concession to vanity. Its purpose is to drive home that he’s no longer the indestructible, squared-jawed hero of our memories, or of his. The comedy of human frailty spares no one.
Ford was already Medicare-eligible when the prior Indy outing, the unloved Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, hit theaters in 2008. It came mere weeks after Iron Man, the opening salvo of a Marvel onslaught that changed blockbusting even more profoundly then Indy’s creator, George Lucas, changed it with Star Wars three decades earlier. After two or three dozen of those, is anyone still jonesing for another Jones?
I was, anyway. And the news that Steven Spielberg, who directed all the previous entries, had opted to pass the hat to James Mangold—who, with Cop Land, his remake of 3:10 to Yuma, and (especially) Logan, had demonstrated a yen for character-driven, melancholy-laced adventure—did nothing to diminish my curiosity.
Dial of Destiny’s conspicuously digitally enhanced set pieces will remind you Mangold is no Spielberg when it comes to staging crisp and lucid physical action. It’s probably inevitable that for all its valiant efforts to right the ship, this movie still recalls the screensaver-y visual aesthetic of Crystal Skull more than the trio of Indy flicks from the 1980s. (Those were all shot by the great Douglas Slocombe, who got an Academy Award nomination for his cinematography on Raiders of the Lost Ark and was 103 years old when he died in 2016.) But Mangold, who shares screenplay credit with three other writers, gets the emotional tenor right, delivering a consistently pleasurable and intermittently stirring farewell to one of cinema’s most durable heroes. And that goes double or triple for Ford, once again blessing us with a fully committed, admirably human-scale performance as he revisits one of the larger-than-life characters whose shadow he long labored to escape.
Yes, Ford has been digitally youth-anized for the 1944 segment that opens the movie. While the wrinkle-erasure tech is more persuasive here than it was in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman four years ago, it’s still jarring to hear Ford’s gravelly old-man voice emanating from that dashing 40-something mug. He gets a great opening line, though, telling a Nazi: “You’ve got a lot of nice stuff. Other people’s stuff.”
Indy is on a mission to reclaim some Third Reich plunder, which leads to an extended set piece aboard and, inevitably, atop a train. The sequence is nicely paced and punctuated with good physical gags, but it also takes place at night and in the rain, falling victim to the same kind of gummy digital shmear that has made so many superhero films so weightless and un-thrilling. 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade had a choo-choo prologue set decades before its main storyline, too—but that one that was staged in daylight, with Spielberg bringing all of his zeal for suspense and physical comedy to bear.
It’s here that we meet our villain, Jürgen Voller, played by permanent malefactor Mads Mikkelsen. The guy must be the warmest, most gentle teddy bear on earth in real life because he’s played Le Chiffre, the blood-crying gambler who famously attacked 007’s bare scrotum with a rope, and foodie nonapareil Hannibal Lecter. Here he’s a stand-in for Werner Von Braun, the Nazi rocket engineer who was given sanctuary in the U.S. in exchange for his assistance with the space program.
Destiny’s main storyline finds the world celebrating the safe return of the Apollo 11 astronauts with a ticker-tape parade while a divorced-and-dejected Professor Jones is stepping down from his teaching post at Hunter College. (His retirement speech, in full: “Thanks for putting up with me.”) His goddaughter (Phoebe Waller-Bridge, sparking off of her grizzled old costar in a rewarding way) tracks him down with a wild story about trying to find one of the treasures that was aboard that Nazi train a generation earlier. That McGuffin, the eponymous destiny-dial, is a device built by the Greek mathematician/astronomer Archimedes to locate naturally occuring “fissures in time.” It’s a fanciful expansion of the capabilities of the antikythera, a real-life analog computer that could accurately predict eclipses and other astrological phenomena some 2,000 years ago.
Well. It turns out Herr Voller is very interested in this gizmo, too. And you don’t exactly have to be Archimedes to puzzle out why a sore-loser Nazi might want to get his filthy genocidal mitts on a machine that theoretically enables time-travel. The chase that ensues goes from Manhattan (as played by Glasgow, Scotland!) to Tangier to Sicily, with stops to see friends-of-Indy old and new.
Even with a market-rate running time of 144 minutes, a quarter-hour longer than any prior Jones flick, a few characters get short-changed: Boyd Holbrook, such a charming villain in Logan, is underserved in a near-silent role as an enforcer for Mikkelsen’s big bad, and Shaunette Renée Wilson, as a CIA agent torn between protecting her government’s prized asset and stopping Voller’s reign of terror, could’ve contributed much more than the script asks of her.
It’s still a rewarding experience on balance, and one that’s refreshingly not over-reliant on callbacks and nostalgia to get its kicks—even though nostalgia is baked into this franchise on a cellular level. Raiders of the Lost Ark, the biggest hit of 1981, was one big homage to the adventure serials of 45 years earlier. Now we have Dial of Destiny trading on our affection for Raiders, which is as distant in time to us as those serials were to anyone who saw it in theaters in 1981. It’s the mileage, sure. But it’s also the years.
Indiana Jones and Dial of Destiny opens in theaters nationwide on June 29.