Here we are. Five movies in. A bunch of TV episodes and movies, a couple dozen videogames (one of which is a stone-cold classic). Comics, books, tabletop roleplaying games, the works. I've consumed a lot of them as they've come out over the last... forty-two years.
I feel fucking OLD.
Indiana Jones, like seemingly every other thing these days, now belongs to Disney. And if there's one thing Rodent House doesn't do, it's to let its properties lie, even when maybe they should; so it's time to put Harrison Ford in hat and leather one last time before he croaks.
The other thing our corporate overlords don't tend to do is to take any risks, not any more, so the whole thing kind of feels like re-heated leftovers, with a lot of callbacks, references, and at least one familiar face who has no reason to be there plot-wise. Fan service.
But damn it, for a while there at least it works beautifully. In a prologue set in the waning days of World War 2, a digitally de-aged Indy (never did get used to hearing his gruff older voice come out of a sometimes convincing younger mouth) and new-to-the-series-longtime-friend Basil (Toby Jones) are sniffing around a castle as it's looted by the Nazis. Their goal? The Lance of Longinus, a fun reference to a long-debunked myth about Hitler (also a plot point in the Wolfenstein games, so it's a pretty shallow cut as far as these things go.)
An allied bombing stops the looting short, freeing a captured Indy, and soon there's a car and motorcycle chase, ducking nazis within and without a speeding train... you know, derring-do and modern swashbucklery! Fun Indiana Jones-style stuff, more in the vein of the third one than the first. It's about as safe a choice as possible, but I'll take it.
The Spear of Destiny turns out to be a red herring, to be replaced by the film's real McGuffin of Destiny: Archimedes' Antikythera, the titular Dial. Along with it we get our first real glimpse of the film's villain, Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a nazi scientist who alludes at some sort of ultimate power that can be unlocked with the dial.
The epilogue ends rather abruptly - things build up to an explosive climax, and then... it kinds of fizzles out; We jump from things about to blow up good with a weirdly unsatisfying cut to a point in time where the British have the situation under control and the trainwreck is already a fait accompli. Get ready for that sort of thing, this movie has a ton of continuity errors and pacing hiccups.
In any case, that's the prologue done; and it's mostly downhill from here.
Cut to nineteen-sixty-nine-Indy being waken up by his neighbours playing Beatles and David Bowie, in a scene that does a pretty good job of painting him as a defeated old man. Time hasn't been kind to him - he's lost his son Mutt (yay!) and divorced Marion (boo!). Students in his classes can barely stay awake or get engaged in his lectures, in a pointed reference to the beatlemania-like zeal of yesteryear. The dude is, the film is telling us, done.
Luckily his goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), Basil's daughter, comes to snap him out of it. Turns out her father went a bit crazy over the dial, convinced it had dangerous powers, and now she's come to have a look after her dad entrusted it to Indy. She is, in turn, followed by a bunch of ruthless CIA spooks who are working with none other than Voller, who's pulled a Von Braun and is now working for the States building rockets. But he's done with that; now he's after the dial.
There are a bunch of twists and turns- Helena, in a fun reversal, bucks the sort of role her character would normally have in an Indiana Jones movie and is more of an agent of chaos, and a lot of fun. She brings with her a tween sidekick (Ethann Isidore) who gets a way-too-cute introduction with a homemade plane dashboard. As the action bounces around ports in the Mediterranean, is he going to get a chance to fly a real plane? Well...
The movie hops from destination to destination, and setpiece to setpiece, at a good clip. The action is constant... but unfortunately very uneven, and full of continuity errors and lousy sequencing. It also pulls a lot of moves that wouldn't feel out of place in a late Fast & Furious sequel; I'm not necessarily against that, but it felt a bit out of place here. Overall, it's fine - not very exciting and weirdly lifeless at points, but it's got enough silliness and variety to be entertaining.
The script is harder to excuse. For all of its straining to recapture the magic of the previous films, it's also full of dodgy twists and developments, stupid, inexplicable decisions, and it never compensates by coming up with anything cool. Plot holes abound and things happen just because... well, the good guys can't lose the bad guy's trail, and viceversa, because then there'd be no more movie.
There are also a few very weird, dumb choices, like establishing a character can't swim and then having him swimming without any major issues, or a seemingly fatal bullet wound that doesn't really end up informing the action in a major way.
The movie's had a long and troubled production, which undoubtedly accounts for some of the issues; but also consider David Koepp was involved as a writer. That's been a warning sign for the last couple of decades.
Once you take all of this into account, any goodwill accrued in those excellent first twenty minutes and the other good things the movie has got going for it has been spent by the time we arrive at a very... weird finale, one that does not compare that well to Jones facing off against alien phenomena. It's the furthest afield any of the mainline movies have gone outside the realm of credibility... and it's kind of for nothing. Like everything else in the movie, the supposedly momentous final stretch is oddly impact-less; it doesn't serve much of a function for our heroes' journey. I mean, I see what they were going for, but it feels extremely forced and artificial; Unearned.
Not to mention it's a pretty underwhelming way to dispatch the film's villain and resolve the plot. Even if it kinda fits with the series' ethos of letting the bad guys get killed off by whatever it is they're looking for, it was particularly uninspired.
At least the coda is nice, and the series manages to end sweetly on a couple of grace notes.
I normally like director James Mangold, but here he seems to have lost control of the CGI monstrosity he's ushered into being. Even when the movie is good -as it is in the prologue, and during a few other bits- it feels a bit too fake, much of the action weightless and artificial. Luckily the actors are very game, starting with Ford not just fully inhabiting his iconic character, but also giving him a lot of depth and soul. Waller-Bridge brings a lot of impish energy to the proceeds, and while Mikkelsen is maybe too obvious a choice as a villain, his usual chilly, calm and collected brand of villainy is still pretty cool. I found it funny that he kind of sounds like the voice of reason, even after donning full Nazi regalia and talking about [SPOILERS] going back in time to kill Hitler to save the Reich. That's a good one.
And of course you've got the John Williams score doing a lot of heavy lifting in the background. Fully counts as another character. I'm not one for nostalgia, not much... but damn- those themes.
So. This is definitely not good, but it's not exactly bad either; I think I liked it about the same as the previous sequel (which is: not that much, but I don't seem to hate as much as everyone else). Even at two hours and a half it didn't feel like a chore, I don't regret watching it. Don't need to lock it in a box and forget it in a warehouse somewhere, but it'll probably end up on a high shelf along with that crystal skull and other lesser knick-knacks.
Faint, qualified praise... but what are you going to do? Sometimes it's best to let sleeping dogs lie.
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