INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

The summer season of New Instalments You Didn't Need continues: after Transformers 7 and DC Comics 13/Keaton Batman 3/Affleck Batman 6 (?) comes Raiders 5, an entirely unnecessary mess of a dead horse that yet again feels the inexplicable urge to wink to the fans with recurring characters that don't need to be there, and to try and crank up the action by making the chases and fights longer and noisier and more chaotic than ever before. Gone are the simple, linear, easy to follow but no less exciting setpieces like the truck chase from Raiders, the tank sequence from Crusade or even the dancefloor frenzy from Temple Of Doom: the template now is the jungle jeep chase from Crystal Skull, but more of it. Now, anything goes and the hell with wit, plausibility or basic physics. Like all the other blockbusters of the last few years, everything is CGId into pixelgasms of nonexistent nonsense, and this time it's thrown into your eyes at a hundred miles an hour because Dan (The Bourne Confusion) Bradley's doing the second unit.

Most series go on for two instalments more than strictly necessary, whether it's Star Trek, Die Hard or Saw and Indiana Jones has long passed its natural end point. Having capped everything nicely with the end of Last Crusade, they didn't need to do a fourth, especially as everyone was now twenty years older and frankly looked it. In fairness I quite liked Crystal Skull, but felt that they had pushed it as far as it could go and they just about got away with it: there was just about enough good stuff to mitigate the bad. Now they've taken it too far and it doesn't work.

The first section of Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny is the best, with Jones, as ever, trying to get artefacts away from the Nazis in 1944. The CGI de-aging is convincing enough that we could be watching a 35-year-old Harrison Ford, but the effect is dissipated by his 80-year-old voice. Intriguingly, this sequence sets up one mythical relic (the Lance Of Longinus, which pierced Christ on the cross) as the potential McGuffin before discarding it in favour of one half of the altogether less impressive-sounding Archimedes' Dial which, after a long and chaotic action sequence on a train, Jones and his colleague Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) manage to snatch from the evil Voller (Mads Mikkelsen). In 1969, Voller is still searching for the dial, following Shaw's daughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) as she tracks the Dial down so she can sell it to pay off gambling debts, and only the 80-year-old Jones knows where it is. Cue another loud and chaotic action chase sequence...

No sooner does Jones arrive in Tangiers in pursuit of Helena than we get yet another long and ever more chaotic chase sequence between two cars and two tuk-tuks, before we then all have to go off to Greece to meet Antonio Banderas and raid a shipwreck, and then we all have to shoot off to Sicily to find the other half of the dial and take off for Munich for Mikkelsen's big plan, except the plan goes wrong and the (finally) final act of the movie cannonballs through the credibility barrier even harder than any of the aforementioned nonsense, even harder than the last act of Crystal Skull. If the previous film felt as if they'd stopped making Bond films after Goldfinger, waited 20 years and then returned with Moonraker, then this feels like them waiting another fifteen years before giving us Die Another Day, all with an increasingly aged Sean Connery.

And it's no fun. For all the dizzying mayhem there's very little humour, either verbal or visual, surprisingly not even from Grumpy Old Fart Indy with his shirt off shouting at the hippies next door to turn the music down. (James Mangold isn't Spielberg and can't - or doesn't want to - put in those comedic touches like shooting the swordsman in Raiders or the gruff interplay between Jones and Jones in Last Crusade.) Helena is surprisingly unsympathetic (for much of the time) and I never really warmed to her either as a character in her own right or as a foil for Indiana; not even as much as the legendary Willie Scott from Temple. Toby Jones is engaging while he's on, of course, but that's not enough, and the mighty John Williams returns with a very John Williams Indiana Jones score, though curiously (given that this has to be the last one now) he elects not to conclude the final credits with a big rousing rendition of the Raiders March, in favour of a more muted presentation of lesser, and less memorable, cues.

So why, given the excessive budget (scratching on the door of $300 million, if you believe Wikipedia), the lack of any proper wit or humour, the preponderance of heavily CG-augmented nonsensical action and a third act that I just didn't buy, do I feel a tad less hostile to this than to the intolerable The Flash and the inexcusable Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts that came out in the last few weeks? Partly it might be that Harrison Ford can still make these things watchable even at eighty, and partly it might just be that for the first chunk at least I was kind of enjoying it and the de-aging worked well enough. But it may also be down to a nostalgic liking for the earlier Indiana Jones films which I certainly don't have for those other franchises. And that's the problem. Raiders was already infused with a nostalgic love for the old pulp adventure movies and Saturday matinee serials of decades past and the next two ran with that. But who in 2023 is still nostalgic for Charlton Heston in Secret Of The Incas or (picking at random) the 13-part Lost City Of The Jungle from 1946? Today's audience is too young to be nostalgic even for Indiana Jones movies: they've got other things to reminisce fondly about. 

Look, Dial Of Destiny isn't terrible. It's got some good players in it, the period settings are well evoked, the music is fine, the first section is properly Indiana Jones entertaining, and Indy is still more of an engaging hero than the current crop of cardboard cutouts from the Marvel, DC and Transformers films even if he is clearly way too old for all the international gallivanting. But it's still overlong and messy, the final act doesn't work, and the film sags badly in the middle with the underwater sequence. And beneath it all there seems little more than a desire to milk the intellectual property one more time rather than create another. As Jones Senior urged Junior at the end of Last Crusade: "Let it go".

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