Heading into December 2023, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny finally streamed on Disney plus, which means it was finally my dial o’ destiny to see the darned thing.
Not much of a choice: As a completist, I would feel lost not seeing the fifth and final installment of the beloved movie series, which (checks watch) spans 42 years from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) spring chicken to this fedora-capped swan song.
Dial of Destiny is a mess of contradictions: It’s simultaneously moving forward and backwards in more ways than one. Story-wise, it flashes back to late-stage WWII, taking place shortly after Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Then it leaps forward to 1969, finding its crusty old title character at a New York college, still teaching archaeology (to bored students who’ve long since ceased flirting with their professor) but about to retire. Eventually the film flashes back to the early 1950s, and there’s more era-hopping from there.
As a filmgoing experience it’s similarly jumpy: We’re treated to a digitally de-aged Harrison Ford, as if seeing him in his Raiders of the Lost Ark heyday, then shown the octogenarian Ford in his cranky-old-Manhattanite milieu. If he had a lawn he’d be yelling at someone to get off of it.
Sitting out this movie are Steven Spielberg, who directed the first four, and George Lucas, who produced them prior to selling most of the rights (and perhaps the empty bottle that once contained his mojo) to Disney. For this one the reins, or at least the whip, were handed to James Mangold, a director not well-known for action outside of Knight and Day, but with a strong track record making movies (such as Cop Land and Logan) about heroes aged well past their prime .
Watching Dial of Destiny is like rooting for your grandpa after he discovers the Dylan Thomas “Do not go gentle into that good night” poem and decides to compete in a triathlon: You know he’s not going to win, but you’ve gotta root for him. Mangold and the screenwriters (stalwart David Koepp and two chaps named Butterworth) go the “fan service” route, striking some expected notes (Indy’s on-and-off romance with Marion Ravenwood is a plot point) and reminding us of Indy’s disinclination toward herpetology, while John Williams dusts off the music cues for a comforting if perfunctory reprise.
The whole thing feels a little weird. The movie aims for legacy fulfillment, and the action scenes are thoroughly gassed up by CGI effects, but it’s like watching an energetic tap dancer who’s trying to hide pain from the rocks in his shoes. The Dial of Destiny bounces swiftly but feels heavy with the weight of one director (Mangold) striving with all his might to recreate the touch of another (Spielberg), and no matter how well he pulls it off, Spielberg’s inventiveness — the spark of a director amusing himself with something new — is missing.
An early sequence recalls the Road-Warrior-like truck sequence from previous Indiana Jones films, but computer graphics have so overwhelmed the filmmaking process that it’s more like watching a highly polished videogame cutscene than the result of on-location blocking, gutsy stuntmen, and actual fume-spewing, chassis-pulverizing vehicles. I’m spoiled by action movies where the people involved were in danger of something more than carpal-tunnel syndrome. In Dial of Destiny, you often know you’re watching a digital puppet whose exuberant leaps are programmed in a dim room full of monitors.
Action sequences stand out for their deja-vu-ness, replacing the “anything goes” mantra from Temple of Doom with “the same stuff goes.” One such sequence takes place inside and atop a moving train, and sure, you can’t fault an Indiana Jones movie for leaning on a serial-movie trope. But dang, compare this action sequence, with its standard “Duck! It’s a tunnel!” beat and its deus-ex-machina way of dispatching the final villain, to the dynamic and thrilling train sequence of the same summer’s Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. It’s like a mangy old cat compared to a kitten. (Oddly enough, both movies also had a split-in-half MacGuffin object, keeping villains and heroes running after other half.)
Another action sequence takes place in Morocco, as Indiana Jones is pursued by Nazis, and a new sidekick, Indy’s unreliable but archaeology-minded goddaughter, is pursued by a debtor who happens to be her ex-lover. They’re driving tuk-tuks through a labyrinth of narrow, cobbled city streets, with so many reversals and vehicle-swaps it’s both ambitious and exhausting. (Car plowing through a fruit stand? No. Car going down a staircase? Yes.) Again, it feels like Mangold was doing “Spielberg’s Greatest Hits” and recreating the elaborate Morocco-streets chase toward the end of The Adventures of Tintin, which at least, as an animated film, had the benefit of dodging the “it looks like CGI” complaint that dogs Dial of Density. Mangold can handle complicated action but he lacks Spielberg’s tonal deftness; comedic riffs don’t blend well side-by-side with Nazis gunning down innocents.
Let’s nit-pick this movie’s action sequences a little more, shall we? What’s with the high-speed train crash that somehow manages not to derail? What are the odds of a gap in a tunnel divider appearing just as one’s galloping a horse toward an oncoming subway? How’d the pursuers know which subway station Indy’d be in, and how’d they get there so fast? How does this aged professor stay fit enough to deep-sea dive, given the state of elder care in 1969?
So, what’s to like? Not the film’s ongoing brown and….brown color palette. Not the story’s unsettling tendency to abruptly kill characters in ways that feel too real (two of Indy’s college associates are shot in cold blood by a Dave “Kids in the Hall” Foley-resembling henchman whose defining characteristic, as played by Boyd Holbrook, is that he’s mean).
Nonetheless, Dial of Destiny rests atop a mountain of goodwill from the first three movies in the series, and it doesn’t spoil it. For those predisposed to like the film, as I am, the roadblocks are surmountable, though repeat viewings are unlikely. It also patches up some of the bad will from the fourth movie, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in part by dismissing the unpleasant Shia LaBeouf character (Indy’s son, Mutt) as a casualty of the Vietnam War. That’s the biggest relief since George Lucas dropkicked Jar-Jar Binks to the sidelines after The Phantom Menace.
The always-good Harrison Ford, age 80 at the time of the film’s release, pays full respect to his best-loved character (tied with Han Solo) and revels in expanding and concluding Indy’s story. The rest of the casting is strong, including Toby Jones, as Indy’s friend whose doomed obsession with an Antikythera (the title’s intricate metal “dial”) drives the plot. Mads Mikkelsen brings Bond-villain Le Chiffre vibes to his role as a seething not-so-former Nazi who thinks Hitler didn’t try hard enough. You know he’s evil the moment you find out his name is Jürgen, because what decent chap ever had an umlaut?
Returning as Sallah, John Rhys-Davies is as age-worn as Ford but more lovable. It’s a nice symmetry with Raiders of the Lost Ark, when Sallah saved Ford from eating the “bad date.” On a more curious note, Antonio Banderas shows up as one of Indy’s pals, because….his Puss in Boots also wears a fancy hat? Perhaps in some alternative universe, the swaggering Spanish actor could have been Indiana Jones, or at least Iberia Jones. Similarly curious is how Shaunette Renée Wilson’s neutral character is handled; the Mod Squad-style actress is low-key effective in a way that leaves you wanting more, but the underwritten character disappears like a pen abruptly running out of ink.
The standout, and a complete wildcard of a choice, is Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Helena Shaw, Indy’s goddaughter. For those of us who got to know the writer/actress from her TV show Fleabag, which led off with her damaged character’s arch query about the diameter of her “arsehole,” Waller-Bridge’s inclusion brings black-comedy brilliance to what otherwise would be a fuddy-duddy-fest. A onetime theater brat specializing in sardonic confessionals, Waller-Bridge is the last person you’d expect to see in a big-budget adventure, yet somehow she landed in two George Lucas-related roles: As the rights-asserting robot L3-37 in Solo: A Star Wars Story, and here merrily ejecting Nazi soldiers from airplane bomb hatches. If an action movie is at times an awkward fit for Waller-Bridge, it’s probably because this tall glass of gin, seemingly teleported to us from another epoch, exudes likable awkwardness in general.
Waller-Bridge’s timelessness fits Dial of Destiny‘s final act, where we learn what the title contraption, invented by Greek inventor Archimedes, does when its mathematical magic is harnessed. There’s a bit of Back to the Future to the finale (George McFly: “You are my…Dial of Density”), handled reasonably well, with enough of its own spin to seem fresh. Whereas the previous film’s UFO-related ending annoyed audiences for feeling like a pointless shift of genre, this finale has thematic depth, reflecting on Indy’s history-chasing persona, as well as the audiences who are saying goodbye to the unrepeatable Spielberg/Lucas era of spectacular filmmaking — and hoping that something else fun, but different, is on the horizon.
