The Daily Telegraph - Features
This old treasure should never have been dug up
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
12A cert, 154 min
Dir James Mangold
Starring Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen, Ethann Isidore, Toby Jones
★★★★★
Bringing back Indiana Jones in the 2020s is a potentially risky business. When your hero is trafficking in pillaged artefacts, can he really claim they belong in a museum any more? Shouldn’t he be returning the golden idol to its Peruvian tomb?
In his first adventure in 15 years, Harrison Ford’s Dr Henry Jones dodges these ideological pitfalls as nimbly as he does the actual pitfalls.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is every inch a replica of the standard Indy experience, with subterranean booby-trapped dungeons, an escape from a Nazi fortress and an ever-so-slightly irritating younger sidekick (in this case Teddy, played by 16-year-old French newcomer Ethann Isidore).
Unfortunately, though, it ultimately feels like a counterfeit of priceless treasure: the shape and the gleam of it might be superficially convincing for a bit, but the shabbier craftsmanship gets all the more glaring the longer you look.
At 80, Ford himself really gives it his all. It’s now 1969, and just as he retires from his archeology lecturing post at a New York university, his goddaughter Helena Shaw (Phoebe WallerBridge) tumbles back into his life: she’s on a hair-brained mission to track down Archimedes’s Antikythera – the Dial of Destiny – after her late father Basil (Toby Jones, good value in flashback, in a mad squirrel sort of way) was driven mad by the quest.
One half of the device sits in Indy’s office archive. But the other
The action is generic and clunky; the film is painfully short on spark and bravado
is goodness knows where, and it’s also being hunted by both the CIA and a German scientist played by Mads Mikkelsen. So off everyone goes on a globe-trotting chase for the lost cogs, whose ultimate purpose is left so vague for so long that you sometimes sense that the film is trying not to spoil itself.
What set apart Spielberg’s masterful three original Indiana Jones films – and, to a lesser extent, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, from 2008 – was the balletic spring in their tread. They actually moved like page-turners, as if they could hardly believe how exciting the stories they were telling were, and the most memorable comic details (think Raiders of the Lost Ark’s sieg-heiling monkey, or its master swordsman felled with a single bullet) were carried off with pure blink-and-miss-it showmanship.
Here, though, the action is generic and clunkily staged. And as for the comedy – well, Waller-Bridge has clearly been given the instruction to “just do Fleabag”, but she’s operating without Fleabag-level material here, and her frequent attempts to juice up the clumsy gags with her trademark winking delivery tend to fall flat.
Director James Mangold – the man behind such sturdy entertainments as Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma and Le Mans ’66 – must have struck Lucasfilm as a safe pair of hands when Spielberg stepped down from the job in 2020. Perhaps that’s the problem. The film is loaded with mayhem but painfully short on spark and bravado.
Even the pulpy climax, in which the dial’s time-travelling powers are finally put to use, feels frivolous. As the antikythera does its history-altering thing, you can’t help but wish someone would twist it back to the point at which this film was commissioned and say: “Actually, do you know what? Four were enough.”
In cinemas now