Movie Review: ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’
Director: James Mangold
Cast: Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen, Antonio Banderas, John Rhys-Davies, Toby Jones, Boyd Holbrook, Ethann Isidore, Shaunette Renée Wilson, Thomas Kretschmann, Olivier Richters
Plot: Indiana Jones is retiring as a lecturer and archeologist, and with the advent of the Moon landing emphasising how much the world has moved on substantially from Indy’s hey-day. The arrival of his goddaughter Helena reopens an old case involving a partially completed Antikythera mechanism built by Archimedes.
Review: As we sit watching an elderly Indiana Jones, angry and lonely in his old age, we are forced to ask why we’re returning to this world. Everyone of a certain generation has a soft spot for Indiana Jones movies, but that generation is no longer driving ticket sales. New cinematic franchises have risen and fallen, and rolling out an 80 year old man for an action adventure feels pretty pointless. He was looking pretty rocky in his last adventure, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and that was 15 years ago. Perhaps it’s simply an opportunity to leave things on a better note after the previous effort left things off on a sour note. With Dial of Destiny they do at least take the chance to give the character a more complete character arc where he can put to rest his past mistakes.
We’re starting out in an awkward spot, as Dr. ‘Indiana’ Jones (Ford) had hung up his hat and settled down to family life with old flame Marion Ravenwood and son ‘Mutt’ Williams and his allies are all retired or dead. As we learn over the course of the adventure, Mutt died in the Vietnam War, and the loss drove a wedge between Indy and Marion ending their marriage. This reveal sets Indy up to be a very dark place at the end of his life, a position that ties into the MacGuffin of this particular film. An extensive flashback sequence sees Indy back in WWII along with friend Basil Shaw (Jones) and some passable deaging effects. The pair derail (boom boom) Nazi plans to retrieve the Lance of Longinus only to find the real treasure is half of the Archimedes Dial.
Jumping decades ahead to Indy on his retirement day and the arrival of Helena (Waller-Bridge), daughter of Basil Shaw and currently being pursued by German astrophysicist Jürgen Voller (Mikkelsen). They’re both looking for the Archimedes Dial for different reasons – she’s looking to make a buck and he’s trying to travel through time. Both of these characters are great fits for a new generation of Indy stories. Helena has the skills and knowledge that Indy brings to the table but works with a very different motivation and worldview that conflicts with Indy’s moral standpoint, but with a familial connection that brings them back to each other. Voller is a more traditional foil, with Mikkelsen doing what he does best as the sophisticated villain. Rather than finding a new bad-guy group for Indy to murder his way through, they’ve made Voller a Nazi who never let go of his beliefs after the war. His ultimate scheme is to use the Archimedes Dial to travel through time and take control of Nazi Germany from Hitler with the intent of winning the war himself.
On the way to the final confrontation we get tombs to explore, fights in Tangier and diving off the coast of Greece. Helena brings her own junior sidekick in the form of Teddy Kumar (Isidore) and Indy looks up old ally Renaldo (Banderas) for exploring shipwrecks. Things stay fresh, the bad-guys are intimidating and dialogue has a good patter to it. In spite of all the ingredients being present, this movie did wind up underperforming.
There’s a few reasons for this. Although movies generally move at a quicker pace these days, this franchise is determined to stay in the past. In both the previous two movies in this series, you’d be hard-pressed to find any scene that couldn’t be trimmed down by at least a third. Take, for example, the opening train scene that features Indy entering a carriage with a couple of Nazi soldiers present. He gets past them and finds himself in a carriage with even more Nazi soldiers. We see Indy get past them, and enters a third carriage that also has more Nazi’s in it. We didn’t need to see this gag play out twice. Every joke gets played one line of dialogue longer than necessary, every scene of exposition gets one to many allegories to explain it, every action scene has just a few to many obstacles added. It doesn’t help that most action scenes end with layers of CGI backgrounds, foreground, actors, whatever else and the interest peters out.
An unnecessary but otherwise enjoyable final outing for the classic hero. It could easily have 30-45 minutes cut without losing a beat. We liked the new characters, and along with the whacky final act they served the main character’s story rather than acting as set dressing. This could have been a bigger success with a tighter edit, but at least it’s better than the last one.
Rating: SEVEN out of TEN
