Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

The thing is, no sequel is going to recapture the original and Raiders of The Lost Ark is a perfect film. Part of its perfect-ness must be the originality of it back in the day, kind of a laugh as it was made by academically schooled film-makers who were riffing on the cinema shorts of the early years. Then the fourth movie, Kingdom of The Crystal Skull, disappointed many fans and became a by-word for franchises going off the rails.

Happily James Mangold’s new and presumably final episode in the saga has quite a bit going for it, with no sudden plot swerves towards aliens at the end. The result is an action film that indeed throws you right in to a wartime chase for a religious relic, which sees Harrison Ford digitally de-aged to look approximately as he did in The Fugitive. He and Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) are trying to rescue the relic from the collapsing Nazi regime. Yes, the Nazis are the enemy again—which is always good for Indiana Jones: the only grey areas are around their uniforms, and so you can have a bad guy entirely devoid of humanity, in this case Mads Mikkelsen’s Dr Voller, and everything’s set for that classic battle between good and evil.

The relic they’re initially chasing isn’t the one that the story is about. Jones, in cranky old professor mode is living in New York in the Sixties as the astronauts land on the moon and the kids listen to their music and smoke their weed. He teaches to fairly bored students who aren’t interested in his ancient history lessons, but his God-Daughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) reintroduces the action as Indy once again goes after a piece of ancient history—and save the world again. The opening action sequence on a “Nazi train” is immediately engrossing and involves everything that you’d expect where there’s fighting on trains. The evocation of New York in the Sixties with grouchy Dr Jones watching television in his pants, basically, is great and the chase scene through the parade is really good too. There’s a Morocco setting, and then there’s the end—which is just a hoot.

Thematically it’s close to Raiders but there’s a mournfulness around old Indy and a feeling that he’s not part of the world he’s grown into—and then there’s the bad guys who want to re-do history. This is likely to be a universal feeling and although it’s not part of classic cartoony action movies, it kind of suits a fan-base that’s got old watching these films—and increasingly looking back on the really good ones. The movie is 154 minutes long and could have lost twenty around the middle—which gets a little bogged down in setting up the end. Not to take anything from the return of John Rhys-Davies as Sallah. Phoebe Waller-Bridge brings a new variant of the action partner that Indy always has with him, although Marion is and always will be the first and the best “goddam partner”. I really liked her, and she’s the first British ‘side-kick’, and looks really good. She has a reasonably preposterous action sequence

There’s no trepidation for fans stepping into this film, not sure whether they’re getting what they want from a franchise film at this stage in the lifetime of the saga. It’s got plenty of action and some sadness, and the action is exciting. These films aren’t going to compete with the ones that came before, but although it’s long it’s a good movie.