Museum Piece
Less racist than ‘Temple of Doom’, better than ‘Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’. Still doesn’t make it ‘Raiders’.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Director: James Mangold • Writers: Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, David Koepp, James Mangold
Starring: Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen, Ethann Isidore, Antonio Banderas, John Rhys-Davies, Toby Jones, Boyd Holbrook, Karen Allen
USA • 2hrs 34mins
Opens Hong Kong June 29 • IIA
Grade: B-
I’m going to start by stating, definitively, none of these sequels is ever, under any circumstances, going to top the original Raiders of the Lost Ark from 1981. No matter how creaky some of the pre-CGI effects are it remains one of cinema’s great throwback adventures. Others have come close with the adventure thing (Romancing the Stone) and the “average” guy hero (Die Hard), but none has made us feel it the way we did the crack of Indiana Jones’ – genius archaeologist, professor, badass, stud – nose when that giant bald Nazi punched him before getting chopped up by a plane propeller. Or made us fist pump when Mr Katanga defiantly covered for him as he snuck onto a German U-boat. Ha! And once again, for the bloody record, Raiders clocks in under two hours.
So after the crime against humanity that was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull it’s back to the IP well for one more try at a send-off. Why? Good question, considering Indy literally rode off into the damn sunset in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Indy (Harrison Ford, duh) and Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) finally got married to live lives in quiet domestic bliss at the end of Crystal Skull. Pretty final, those. Yet here we are. And as expected with a legacy property, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny loads up on nostalgic callbacks and fanservice (though less in your face than some) that reminds you of Raiders but never quite captures what made that such a classic. Dial of Destiny isn’t bad. It’s just underwhelming.
No one could be faulted for wanting to get swept away, so to speak, by Indy’s globetrotting, and director James Mangold (3:10 to Yuma, Ford v Ferrari) certainly tries to carry us off. The action bounces from Brooklyn to Sicily to Morocco, there are crypts and tombs, creepy crawlies on cave walls and fanatics bent on world domination, all set to John Williams’ familiar, still rousing score. Oh, and time travel! But the script by Mangold, hit and miss writers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (Edge of Tomorrow and Ford v Ferrari, but Spectre by Jez), and David Koepp – who gets not enough credit for Apartment Zero, is coasting on Jurassic Park and is responsible for Crystal Skull – cuts him off at the knees by jettisoning the story thread that he’d work best with: ageing, obsolescence and being left behind.
Dial of Destiny begins in the late 1960s (Apollo astronauts make an appearance), with a decrepit, drunk, lonely Indy about to retire from teaching when his estranged goddaughter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) drags him into one last adventure to find Archimedes’ fabled Antikythera (the titular dial), facing off against a Nazi nemesis, Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen, effortlessly superior and menacing). Cop Land and Logan provided all the prep Mangold would need to really dive into Dial of Destiny’s most compelling bits: Indy is, essentially, a relic; a man out of step with the rapidly changing world around him. He’s fixed in the past at the height of the Space Age. How that affects him, and the emotional impact of those changes is addressed in passing with a (pretty bad) joke and some expositionary dialogue. On top of that, the script wedges in a sly comment on the illegal antiquities trade – Helena deals in the black market – but never goes further, at a time when museum piece provenance is making news.
You could argue that the Indiana Jones franchise itself is an apt metaphor for matinee serial-style storytelling like it, something with one foot in the grave, about to be pushed all the way in by shiny CGI artifice (and probably AI). The opening, Nazi-punching train ride goes hard on de-ageing CG (for Ford, Mikkelsen and Jones), and yeah, the tech is getting better, but that’s not what we watch Indiana Jones for. Raiders of the Lost Ark was nearly the Platonic ideal of romantic, escapist entertainment, and it’s proven difficult to replicate. There’s enough in here to make diehards giggle with glee, and many will, but if you’re not already in Jock’s cockpit (that sounds dirty) this isn’t going to make you go back to the source. Now, in fairness, Ford looks more engaged than he did in Star Wars: Episode 7 – The Force Awakens but only just, and Waller-Bridge is a match for Marion as the female lead – despite the film constantly undermining her character. The writers have conflated “cool chick” with “felon”, and it is Waller-Bridge’s sheer determination and inherent comic timing that pull Helena back from the brink. A stellar supporting cast with some entirely pleasing small parts/cameos garners some good will: hearing Ark of the Covenant locator Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) sing his sea ditties never gets old, though why the salty boat captain demanded an actor of Antonio Banderas’ calibre is baffling. Welcome, but baffling. But it’s Allen’s Marion who gets the film’s single most human moment, reminding us what made the first film so memorable and really putting the series to bed. We think. — DEK