A Drag Getting Old: A Review Of Indiana Jones 5

“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”

It’s awful. 

It was a long-ago, faraway time—1978—when Steven Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan and George Lucas put a few days aside for a story conference (a transcript runs 125 pages) that formed the foundation of Kasdan’s screenplay for “Raiders of The Lost Ark.” Forty-five years later, it feels mean to even write a review of the latest Disney-Lucasfilm production; the closest element to the moist pulpiness of George Lucas’ imagination is the drear title, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” (The ugly main title treatment is the first of many disappointments.)

“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”

In no way is “IJ5” (as the Disney image files title it), the transfixing, exceedingly calibrated runaway train of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” or even the “Anything Goes” introduction to “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” Except for quiet moments when Harrison Ford, with gravity and simplicity, gets to radiate the understated charisma for which he is well and rightfully known and well-remunerated, it’s flat. The deadly geometry of that first screenplay and the offhand inspiration of Spielberg’s direction overshadows the work of James Mangold, who runs this show. 

In the protracted opening couple of reels, a very young, computer-crafted Harrison Ford (and a phalanx of server farms) plays a younger cultural marauder who first encounters the dull MacGuffin of the title. The time-travel device, supposedly crafted by Archimedes, is jumbo on the mumbo. “Fissures in time”! Did you hear me, man? We get to go back and change history! Fissures in time!

Nazis, however, one must note, are punched, often and to oft-crunchy effect. Plus: “Too many Nazis!”; “Have you ever met Hitler?”; “Nazis!”

The dim, nighttime train mano-a-Nazi-a-mano that opens the movie is only the first of many CGI-burnished sequences of little weight or impact. Later in the film, I took a washroom break during an overscaled underwater eel attack and really didn’t want to return. But I gave thanks to the full employment of hundreds of digital artists and hustled back.

Later, the character is closer to Ford’s age (eighty now), as he plays Professor Jones on his retirement day at Marshall College, which coincides with a ticker-tape parade for the astronauts of Apollo 11, the streets (and nonexistent alleys) of New York City created at great cost in Edinburgh, Scotland. (In case we forget who the hero is, the calling  out of “Indy!”; “Indy”; “Indy!” is relentless.)

“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”

Phoebe Waller-Bridge (“Fleabag”) joins the cast as Jones’ goddaughter, looking cool when she strikes poses but unbearable when her eyes flash or she quickly grins: no Karen Allen, she. Waller-Bridge does not hold the screen the way Ford does by not even blinking.

Along with Ford and Waller-Bridge are Mads Mikkelsen, Antonio Banderas, that swarm of toothy eels, Toby Jones, John Rhys-Davies, Shaunette Renée Wilson, Thomas Kretschmann, Boyd Holbrook, Olivier Richters and Ethann Isidore. The screenplay is a compound effort by Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, David Koepp and Mangold, based on those characters created by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman. 

It’s a job of work. But it’s so far from 1936, and 1969, and first inspiration.  It’s less a continuation than a vestigial tail.

“Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny” opens Thursday, June 29. John Williams’ score sounds good in a big, loud theater.