In Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the first Indiana Jones film in fifteen years, the fifth film in the long running action-adventure franchise mostly takes place in the year 1969. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is struggling with approaching retirement and embracing old age.
In 1944, Indy and Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) were able to track down and retrieve a dial that was constructed by Archimedes and allows its user the ability to travel through time.
Half of the dial has been sitting in Indy’s college archives for at least a decade and the other half is hidden away somewhere that the film spends the majority of its 154-minute runtime searching for.
Basil’s daughter, Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) who is also Indy’s goddaughter, is reunited with Indy, but it’s bittersweet. She intends to sell the dial on the black market. Also chasing after the dial is a Nazi named Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen).
Voller eats a giant metal pole to the face in 1944 and re-emerges with a group of Nazi hitmen surprisingly unscathed. Voller intends to use the dial to go back to 1939, kill Hitler, and lead Germany to victory during World War II.
Harrison Ford just turned 81 and was 79 while filming The Dial of Destiny. Ford should be given some credit because he is quite active as an older actor doing far more on screen than you’d likely expect.
The scenes that required Ford to look younger are troublesome though. While Lucasfilm basically used deepfake technology to scour old footage of Ford from previous films, the result is as clunky as it is impressive.
The more you see “young” Indy the more it just looks like a digital face replacement. The shots from the trailer and the shots that don’t have Ford moving his head much are where the effect looks its best, but in standard motion and action sequences the more it just looks like a different head on someone else’s body. The opening sequence in 1944 seriously feels like a deleted scene from one of the Uncharted video games.
The 1969 action sequences are a different breed of ugly animal. Stuntmen for Ford wore Harrison Ford masks during action sequences and while the masks are arguably high quality, they show zero facial expression resulting in Indy looking deathly constipated or heavily confused.
Written by Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, David Koepp, and director James Mangold, The Dial of Destiny feels like an Indiana Jones film in tone and is this huge time traveling adventure with a thrillingly nostalgic score from score composer John Williams, but the film is overwhelmingly boring. At two and a half hours, the movie is bulky with how much story there is. Nobody ever stops talking and it feels like a chase for a time traveling device is purposely made more complicated.
Jez and John-Henry Butterworth worked with James Mangold on Ford v. Ferrari and co-wrote Edge of Tomorrow while David Koepp co-wrote the first Mission: Impossible, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and the 2017 version of The Mummy that simultaneously started and destroyed Universal’s plans for their Dark Universe.
The script was rewritten once James Mangold took over the reigns as director from Steven Spielberg in 2020. Harrison Ford claimed that they took out all the jokes pertaining to Indy’s old age, but Indy still gripes about being old in the finished product.
He’s dealing with retirement; he’s separated from Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen in the worst “surprise” cameo ever) because Mutt died in the Vietnam War and the two of them never got over it, and he’s coming to terms with the fact that he can’t travel, explore, or be as expeditious as he used to be.
It’s odd that as much as the writers attempted to distance themselves from referencing Indy’s age, The Dial of Destiny still has a prominent aging aspect to it with a heavy emphasis on hindsight.
The only member of the on-screen cast that seems to be enjoying themselves is Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Harrison Ford looks constantly irritated and seems pissed that they’d even want his shell of a body to return.
Mads Mikkelsen, who is normally superb in just about everything, is dull and forgettable as Voller as the character seems like a watered down and less interesting version of Le Chiffre from Casino Royale. The most interesting thing about Voller is his motivation as Mikkelsen’s performance heavily involves him standing or sitting while acting superior to everyone.
There’s also Helena’s little pickpocket sidekick Teddy (Ethann Isidore). While Helena and Teddy seemingly have a basic desire to steal everything from everyone to sell it all and get rich, Teddy mostly feels like a modern yet Wish version of Short Round.
All the humor in the film feels forced and falls flat, especially throwbacks and homage to previous Indiana Jones film entries. Indy and Helena gripe and moan at each other the entire film. Indy hasn’t seen her in years, and she felt abandoned after her father passed, so there’s a lot of bitterness. It’s not unwarranted, but it also isn’t entertaining.
The Verdict
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny feels like the type of sequel that aimed to capture the magic of its predecessors, had worthwhile intentions, and a talented cast, but it just never properly materialized. The film seems to teeter on the sheer annoyance of a main character grappling with the fact that he’s now a crotchety and wrinkly senior citizen and not the young, grizzled, adventurer he used to be.
With an ending that leaves the Indiana Jones character in a satisfying bookend for the franchise, hopefully The Dial of Destiny is the final Indy film. Like Roger Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon, Harrison Ford is literally too old for this sh*t.