More than 40 years after the character debuted in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and 15 years after he was seen in 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones character has returned to the screen in the new Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. After a prologue in which Ford is de-aged to resemble his younger self, the rest of the film has Indy getting into his usual swashbuckling adventures, even though he’s 80.
Ford’s age isn’t the problem, and neither is the de-aging, which has come a long way since The Irishman four years ago. What’s wrong with Dial of Destiny is an inert story, boring villains, action sequences that are poorly directed, and a crummy plot. The film begins with a 1945-set prologue, in which a de-aged Indy battles Nazis on a train, along with sidekick Basil Shaw (Toby Jones). They’re fighting with the Germans for the titular valuable artifact.
The bulk of Dial of Destiny takes place in 1969, where Indy is living in New York and getting ready to retire for teaching. We’re introduced to the idea of an octogenarian Indiana Jones, clashing with the ascendant 1960s generation, but the film does almost nothing with that idea. He’s visited by Helena Shaw (Fleabag star Phoebe Waller-Bridge), the daughter of the late Basil, who’s both a brilliant archeologist and a con woman. A group of Nazis are after that artifact from the 1945 scene, and they spend the rest of the film chasing Indy and Helena around the world.
Knowing how the worst fanboys are, especially when it comes to Lucasfilm projects, I think a narrative will emerge: That Dial of Destiny was bad, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge was responsible for ruining it. But that’s not true—the actress is wonderful here, and wasn’t used enough. The co-writer of the fine 2021 James Bond film No Time to Die, Waller-Bridge is not among the film’s four credited writers, but perhaps she should’ve been.
As for the villains, played by Mads Mikkelsen, Boyd Holbrook, Mark Killeen and Olivier Richters, they’re Nazis, but they’re not interesting. Other than the part about Mikkelsen’s character being a German defector who played a part in the U.S. space program, the bad guys are so thinly-drawn that it’s not clear where there needed to be four of them instead of one. And while the Nazis’ ultimate plan is intriguing, we’re not told what it is until about the two-hour mark of the movie.
The ending leads to a place of some poignancy, but the film has a hell of a time getting there. Dial of Destiny is the first film in the series directed by someone other than Steven Spielberg, with James Mangold stepping in; Spielberg and George Lucas retain executive producer credits, although it’s not clear exactly how much creative involvement the two had. Mangold has made some fine films, but he makes baffling choices here, starting with the overuse of handheld cameras and extreme close-ups in most of the action sequences. An early scene in which the bad guys chase Jones through a Manhattan parade honoring the Apollo 11 astronauts—in which he ends up on horseback, and in the subway—is the only action scene that delivers.
The night before I saw Dial of Destiny, I saw a different upcoming major action-adventure film. That one featured several elements—a chase scene through a city, an extended action sequence on a moving train, a scene where two characters are handcuffed together, and a MacGuffin that entails elements being fit together—that were also present in Dial of Destiny, only done more skillfully. There was a time when the Indiana Jones franchise had massive influence, but now it’s an also-ran.