After a 15-year-long wait, Harrison Ford dons the hat and whip for one last ride in James Mangold’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. For some who weren’t fans of Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the film acts as a golden opportunity to course-correct the franchise and give Ford a fitting end to his tenure as one of the (if not the) most iconic adventure film protagonists of all-time. And as someone who finds great enjoyment in Crystal Skull and even ranks it above Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the only thing I wanted out of this movie was a fun, fast-paced, and memorable farewell to my all-time favorite movie character.
As a kid, I found great escapism in the Indiana Jones franchise and would consistently watch the trilogy at my family’s summer cottage until the DVDs eventually stopped working. Every Indiana Jones installment has a special place in my heart — especially Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, as it was my first-ever Indiana Jones movie in a theater, which I watched a day after seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time. I hadn’t seen anything quite like it and quickly related to Ford’s Jones, who wasn’t as suave as James Bond and possessed no superhuman skills. He was just some guy (in this case, an archeology professor) who kept getting caught in a series of preposterous situations with the wrong people. But part of the joy of watching the Indiana Jones films is figuring out how he will get out of these elaborate situations with as much strength as the average human being would have. Spielberg always painted him through that lens: he was never too strong. And he had one weakness that anyone could relate to.
Naturally, it was with great excitement that I saw Ford return as his best character in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, even if the reception at Cannes slightly tempered them. As the movie opens in 1944, with a de-aged Indiana Jones beating Nazis to a pulp and discovering a thingamajig that could change the course of history, it felt like we were right back to the classic Indiana Jones films. The punches were perfectly timed, John Williams’ riveting Raiders march never gets old, and the villains seemed captivating. Thomas Kretschmann plays Colonel Weber, who looks for the Lance of Longinus with Dr. Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), whilst Indy and Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) are looking for it too. The Lance turns out to be a fake, but Voller reveals to Weber that he has found half of the Antikythera, a dial crafted by Archimedes that can turn back time.
A fun train fight ensues, and the movie then cuts back to 1969, where Jones is on his last day as a professor before retirement. There, a young woman shows up in his class, who turns out to be Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), Basil’s daughter, on a quest for the Antikythera to finish what his father started. It turns out to be more complicated than that — a CIA agent (Shaunette Renée Wilson) and Voller’s henchmen are also looking for Helena and the first half of the Antikythera, which will lead them to another thingamajig to find the other half of the dial to travel back in time.
Voller, under a new pseudonym, wants to travel back to 1939 Germany to kill Hitler and lead the Nazis to victory, whilst Jones and Helena attempt to stop Voller from doing so. It’s essentially a long game of cat-and-mouse between Jones/Helena, Voller and his right-hand man Klaber (Boyd Holbrook), and the CIA, where they’re all after the same (and rather underdeveloped) MacGuffin.
Of course, some will argue that the Indiana Jones franchise has always been about specific MacGuffins, and it is true. However, Spielberg always ensured that the audience cared somewhat about the quest to get the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders or the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I mean, who doesn’t want to get a cup that grants eternal life? Because of this, we ultimately root for the heroes to get these historical MacGuffins before the villains do. And the way Spielberg has always presented them made it always look like Dr. Jones was going to go on an epic quest because of its weight to the story and historical significance.
There isn’t a single second in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny where Mangold and his co-writers Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, and David Koepp make the audience care about the Antikythera — it’s a thingamajig that the Nazis want to use to win the war. Horse chase. Car chase. Motorcycle chase. Boat fight. Temple gunfight. Plane cockpit gunfight. The Nazis get the thingamajig. Ford and Helena have it back. They think they’re one step ahead of them, but Voller always shows up. This is classic Indiana Jones stuff but lacks the personality and emotional investment that usually enthralls this simple cat-and-mouse game.
Granted, the action scenes are very good. A centerpiece motorcycle chase in Tangiers is the film’s biggest highlight — Mangold and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael frame the scene exactly the way Spielberg and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe would do in Raiders of the Lost Ark’s seven-minute long truck chase, or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’s bravura tank sequence. It’s consistently exciting and moves briskly, with John Williams’ rousing score always perfectly accompanying the on-screen action and giving terrific moments of levity between Ford and Waller-Bridge.
Ford is immaculate as Jones. He always has been and always will be. You can tell from how he plays him in this film that he loves to embody Jones and holds this character close to his heart. At 80, Ford hasn’t lost a single ounce of charm that made the character so likable and relatable in the first place. He also surprisingly holds his own in many action setpieces, but the movie has the tendency to plaster his CGI face on a stunt double. He does many stunts, but you can always tell when he is not involved in the action. As far as the de-aging goes, it’s seen better days. At times, it seems very much in line with how, in my opinion, the technology was perfected in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2, and Captain Marvel with Kurt Russell’s Ego and Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury, respectively. But most of the time, it looks off, plucked straight out of a Call of Duty cutscene, and never fully looks realistic.
Even a flashback with a middle-aged Jones doesn’t look quite as convincing as the de-aging in the latter half of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. The de-aging on Mikkelsen looks far better than Ford’s and is more seamless.
Regardless, Ford also shares great chemistry with Waller-Bridge, who consistently lightens up the tone during some of its more elaborate action scenes, and the two always have great banter whenever they butt heads in the middle of the action or with how they approach their quest. Unfortunately, the movie greatly sacrifices this character development during the movie’s abysmal final act, where no character gets a “fitting end.” It’s also unfortunate that the talents of Toby Jones, Antonio Banderas, Shaunette Renée Wilson, and Boyd Holbrook are pitifully wasted in minor roles, barely developed, and with nothing of interest to do. They got Antonio Banderas to play some random boat captain that anybody else could’ve played. He quickly arrives and disappears as if his arc didn’t matter, and yet, he’s third-billed in the film’s end credits. Mikkelsen is great at playing villains, but his performance here feels indistinguishable from his other villainous portrayals in Doctor Strange and Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. He’s unfortunately been typecast in American films, but his range goes far more than one-note villains. Unfortunately, Voller isn’t as memorable of an antagonist as René Belloq (Paul Freeman) in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Walter Donovan (Julian Glover) in The Last Crusade, who were all fully developed and never had a one-note presence in any of their scenes.
While the movie’s first two acts can be summed up as “mildly enjoyable,” it takes the biggest of all nosedives when it reaches its final moments. Without spoilers, anyone who thought that the “Nuke Fridge” moment or the waterfall scene in Crystal Skull was the character at his worst have seen nothing yet. It not only ends the franchise in the most anticlimactic and uneventful of ways, but it also feels like the filmmakers have taken a massive stain on the character instead of having him end on the highest of highs, which is how every single Indiana Jones installment has wrapped. The Last Crusade saw Indy ride off in the sunset with his father (Sean Connery), Sallah (John Rhys-Davies), and Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott), while Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ended with Indy finally tying the knot with Marion (Karen Allen). What more could you want out of that?
Dial of Destiny ends with an egregious recreation of one of Raiders of the Lost Ark’s best scenes, used for cheap nostalgia instead of a poignant and fitting farewell. As much as one could understand why they ended it this way, it still feels completely unsatisfying and only makes you want to clamor for another movie to tie up what the filmmakers screwed up this time. Funnily enough, the movie could’ve ended in the exact same way but with a different approach by focusing on the characters and why they are so special to millions of moviegoers instead of wrapping up over 40 years of storytelling with nostalgia. We’ll always have Raiders. Dial of Destiny needed something more to make it feel like a memorable and special ending to Ford’s greatest character.
Say what you will about Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but it tied up all of its loose ends. Audiences will, unfortunately, leave Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny feeling unfulfilled with how Mangold and Lucasfilm wrapped up the greatest adventure franchise in film history, one that has not only pioneered a genre but inspired a generation of filmmakers, actors, and film buffs to dive deeper into the art of cinema. If only there could be a way to turn back time and fix this ending.
