By Elias Savada.
For the most part Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny captures the frantic life of its central character — whether he wants it or not — racing around the planet for pieces of its past. It’s a grand send off.”
The tired, gruff archeology teacher is leaving the building, pushed to retirement, abandoned by his wife and his college students — undergraduates who used to swoon on his every word so many decades earlier and are now replaced by bored ass-sitters. What dreary life awaits Professor Henry Walton Jones, Jr.?
Yet. It’s Summer 1969 and there’s a ticker-tape party going on outside, with New York City celebrating Apollo 11’s landing on the moon, and maybe a few Vietnam War protesters in the mix. So, let’s plot one more globe-trotting adventure for the ole man, eh? Naturally, they’ll be some nasty Nazis (again) in the mix!
And thus, Harrison Ford takes up that trademark fedora, whip, and jacket he has worn through all five films in the seek-out-the-weird-relic cliffhanger series, starting with 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark and playing through the Temple of Doom, the Last Crusade, the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and his latest film, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, in which he, and quite a few others, are seeking the two halves of the Archimedes Dial, a device that can predict fissures in time. Let’s do the Time Warp again.
After tackling the first four installments, Steven Spielberg isn’t sitting in the director’s chair this go-round, but James Mangold ably carries the day, and the 142 minutes don’t wallow, although some of the delivery, especially in a key action scene on and under the streets and subway tunnels of Manhattan, in which a horse and a motorcycle do chase through the crowded thoroughfares, are noticeably shot and edited in a manner to hide some of the facial dissimilarities afoot. Ford is played by a stunt double with either a bad mask or some digital enhancements that appear slightly off.
Before we arrive in the Age of Aquarius, however, the feature’s opening 20 minutes sets up for the rest of the film, taking place in the last moments of World War II. The CG de-aging makeup, courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic, used on the faces of Indiana Jones, his partner, Basil Shaw (Toby Shaw), and Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a German scientist intent on procuring the Dial for delivery to Hitler, doesn’t feel all that unsettling. You’re more immersed in the breathless action behind failing German lines, aboard a train in which numerous objects, including half the Dial, are playfully tossed about amid dozens of German soldiers and one particularly nasty officer.
Cast-wise, new blood arrives and old friends rejoin the franchise. Foremost among the newbies is Danish actor Mikkelson and Emmy Award-winning writer and actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag) as Helena Shaw, Indy’s estranged goddaughter. Antonio Banderas makes a quick appearance as a sailor friend of Indy’s who helps locate a piece of the ancient puzzle. Helena’s also made friends with teenage pickpocket and rascally helper Teddy (Ethann Isidore, who shows an inventive approach to his character, much like Ke Huy Quan did as Short Round in 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom).
On the old front, John Rhys-Davies reprises his role as Sallah from the first two Indiana Jones chapters. It’s little more than a cameo, a smile, and a few lines.
Back to the hectic story — from a script by Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, David Koepp and Mangold — it promotes Helena’s obsession with that damn contraption with wavering motives, although they all turn circumspect fairly quickly, as she leaves the professor to deal with Voller — now called Schmidt, a scientist who helped land the American astronauts on the moon — his henchmen, and a bunch of agents who I never could never identify as good, bad, American, or not. Mostly not, I guess.
The action shifts to Morocco, Greece, and Sicily, with one of the more intense fight-for-your-life sequences involving a tuk tuk chase about the streets of Tangier. The action is genuinely non-stop. Mangold helmed Logan, the poignant then final chapter in the life Wolverine, and there is some of that film’s fragile sadness in this finale as well.
Of course, genius composer John Williams returns with his latest rousing score, offering the themes and “special sauce” you have come to expect. He manages to tamp down the silliness that is the film’s climax. For the most part Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny captures the frantic life of its central character — whether he wants it or not — racing around the planet for pieces of its past. It’s a grand send off.
Elias Savada is a movie copyright researcher, critic, craft beer geek, and avid genealogist based in Bethesda, Maryland. He helps program the Spooky Movie International Movie Film Festival, and previously reviewed for Film Threat and Nitrate Online. He is an executive producer of the horror film German Angst and the documentary Nuts! He co-authored, with David J. Skal, Dark Carnival: the Secret World of Tod Browning (a revised edition will be published by Centipede Press).