Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

*/****
starring Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Antonio Banderas, Mads Mikkelsen
written by Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth and David Koepp and James Mangold
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (hereafter Indy 5) is sad and tired. Some of that is on purpose, essaying a lonesome old man who has lost everything he cared about, is terrible at his day job, and is retiring in any case; and some of that is decidedly not on purpose, as the action sequences are simultaneously bloated and flaccid–pale imitations of past glories in a revered franchise whose first two installments are so extraordinary, it hardly matters it hasn’t done anything great for three films now across almost 35 years. Indy 5 tries to infuse some life into itself with the addition of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whose Helena Shaw introduces herself as a young woman Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) knew at some indeterminate point in the past. Given that Indy’s reunion with Marion (Karen Allen) in Raiders of the Lost Ark drops the nugget that she was likely a victim of statutory rape (“I was a child. I was in love. It was wrong and you knew it”), I spent a few minutes wondering if Indy had molested a child Helena. But while Helena–the daughter of new character Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), the obvious replacement for Marcus Brody (the late Denholm Elliott)–remains blissfully clear of one of the darker intimations of the Indiana Jones character, she does function as a hollow doppelgänger for Marion, just as Basil is a hollow shade of Marcus. Meaning that for as bad as the de-aging effects are in this picture, its sparkless attempts to recapture some of the chemistry of the original films are somehow worse.

In an extended prologue set in Poland (I think) at the end of WWII, fake Indy cavorts around with neo-Marcus in the enervated sequel to The Polar Express no one asked for. They’re on a mission to save the Lance of Longinus from a Nazi named Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), though that’s a red herring, as you may have surmised from the title. In the course of a stultifying train set-piece, they discover the true treasure: a chunk of the Dial of Archimedes. I want to be clear that the action here isn’t awful because of the unsettling CGI Botox and shockingly terrible CGI full-figure work that makes Indy look like Toy Story‘s Woody, but because it lacks timing or anything like an enlivening spark that might elevate the familiar into the transcendent. Remember the truck chase in Raiders? How about every other sequence in any of the Mission: Impossibles? John Wick? Indy 5 is as elderly in conception and execution as its octogenarian star. Anyway, the dial is an old-timey invention of mathematician Archimedes that can locate temporal fissures. This doesn’t make much sense in view of what the baddies want to use it for, but it does remind me of the plot of Hudson Hawk, in which a couple of idiots stumble upon a chunk of a clockwork device created by none other than Leonardo da Vinci that catapults them into an adventure where they must find the rest of the doodad before the bad guys do. That’s right, with all this time to think of something and all this money at their disposal, for this swan song of an American icon they landed on a new character who is like an old character and another doodad plot. Considering the state of this country and its embarrassing, exportable culture, the boring, vaguely malignant fucknuttery of Indy 5 is actually the perfect synecdoche for our time and place. Nostalgia is a hell of a soporific–a deadly barbiturate, addictive and emotionally stunting. Unless you think “Make America Great Again” is a slogan peddling progress.

Much of the first half is long expositional monologues during which Waller-Bridge does her eyebrow thing/smarter-than-you-are thing and makes fuck-me eyes at beefcake extras. She does this on a boat belonging to Indy’s buddy Renaldo (Antonio Banderas) to one of Renaldo’s hunky deckhands a few minutes before said side of meat gets perforated by Voller and his henchmen. I say it when women are treated this way and I’ll say it here, too: it’s offensive and unimaginative. Helena’s main character trait is that she’s a smug, tedious piece of shit who likes to fuck; I’ve never watched “Fleabag” and I think I’ll skip it now. She’s searching for chunks of the Dial to sell, but Indy thinks she’s doing it for her dead father, because doing things for fathers who write in notebooks instead of loving their children is something Indy knows about. I should mention, too, that more time is spent explaining where Mutt is than where Short Round is (or has ever been spent explaining where Short Round is), so this film, besides having no ability to read the room, can go ahead and fuck right off. There’s an underwater “action” sequence with eels that “look like snakes!” cries Short Round replacement Teddy (Ethann Bergua-Isidore), to which Indy says, “No, they don’t!” Is there a proper payoff for this setup? There is not. Is there a proper payoff for a carefully established bit about only staying underwater for three minutes, lest the bends set in? No, again. How about for Indy’s air hose getting caught on shipwreck debris? Sorry. All these pieces arranged for a complex action sequence, and plop! Our heroes are yanked out of the water for more deadening exposition. Blah blah blah blah.

Indy 5 lands as the most shrivelled of these films: the least ambitious and most lacking in wonder and aspiration. Perhaps this is an intentional reflection of the “miserable old man Indy” that represents the film’s exhausted, fatalistic ethos. “What’s the point, anyway?” Indy 5 would like to know–and if that doesn’t have an answer, the answer is there’s no point to Indy 5. The shadow of Steven Spielberg crushes this picture like a smothering, euthanizing pillow of the kind angels of mercy in cheap noirs use to pinch out a flickering light. In Spielberg’s hands, something as mean as Temple of Doom is still electric, jumpy. As much as I’ve liked James Mangold’s films in the past, he has never struck me as someone who’s interested in playing in Spielberg’s sandbox. Already the longest entry in the series, Indy 5 feels exactly as long as watching the first four in a row. A movie about a time machine, it functions as one: you lose decades inside it, revisiting beloved moments where these films have bonded with your personal history, and emerge only a couple of hours later, saddened and ineffably ancient. The puzzles in Indy 5 involve no deduction. The big moment in which Helena’s cleverness leads to escape is immediately undone by Helena and Indy being so incredibly stupid that I should have left at that point. And the street-urchin Teddy character is so appalling a plot convenience untangling the script’s dead ends that I wished a few times an ugly death for him just so the people behind this had to use their imagination. Even at their worst, the Spielberg-directed Indiana Jones films had action moments that were thrillingly cathartic: punchy and witty and clean as a whistle. His action tells a story and enhances character, carries emotion and substitutes for exposition, whereas the action in Indy 5 is merely lugubrious nonsense.

Worse than nonsense, it’s boring nonsense–and, even worse than boring and nonsensical, it all carries with it a mild but pervasive taint of pettiness. So many civilians are casually assassinated. Two of Indy’s academic colleagues are gunned down like cattle for no discernible reason but to make the bad guys look worse. A Black FBI (or CIA? It’s not clear) agent, Mason (Shaunette Renée Wilson), gets a truly gross closeup on her face as she dies betrayed, which is just one of many examples of dire bullshit you shouldn’t do in this age of representation without any sort of understanding of representational issues. Meanwhile, the underwater death of one henchman is so cold it makes the hero responsible more irredeemable than he already was. (Then the picture doesn’t have the balls to show the bastard drown.) What I’m trying to say is, there is somehow not one single cheer-worthy moment in this film where Nazis are routinely punched. That’s the only surprising trick Indy 5 manages to pull off. John Williams’s epoch-defining “Indiana Jones Theme” first swells beneath a 25mph tuk-tuk chase, reducing it to self-parody. It’s like using that music to score a video of snails porking. I think about how the Apollo 11 astronauts cameo during a ticker-tape parade that has so little iconographic impact it’s offensive to the memory of their deed, and again how this massive boner functions as a microcosm of how irretrievably broken this disasterpiece is–how completely its appeals to our collective childhood have missed what made these movies special in the first place. It’s easily the worst film of a series that has been maddening before, scattershot before, even bad before, but never so facile (including the jungle swinging in Crystal Skull). Never so pathetic. I wish I could dial back time a few hours. I wish I didn’t have to watch Indiana Jones dodder into dust as Phoebe Waller-Bridge looks on, self-satisfied and knowing. Luckily, most of it’s already faded away.