Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

James Mangold's Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny doesn't make the best first impression. The film's opening gambit is visually unappealing in ways that are both brand new and unnervingly ancient. Set in 1944, Harrison Ford's two-fisted archaeologist fights up and down a speeding Nazi plunder train, hoping to lay his hands on a religious artefact famous enough to have already inspired a mid-90s movie tie-in comic. The relic turns out to be a forgery (although this film's conclusion does allow for the idea that metal wrought in the twentieth century could be raised to the level of sainted icon after having slipped into the ancient past), so attention quickly turns to an incomplete, Archimedean gear; an item so complicated and out-of-time that it must conceal some terrible power. The flashback allows the Disney corporation yet another opportunity to scrub the mileage off a person of advanced age; in this instance, the actor who holds sway over one of their most prestigious pop culture purchases. 

This exorbitantly expensive makeover aims to fossilize bankable nostalgia in computer generated amber, a digital veil that conceals the flaws accumulated by time while also reversing perceived mistakes made by filmmaking regimes less obsessed with the relentless issue of instalments. Any spell the sequence could hope to conjure is immediately thwarted though when Ford opens his mouth and the gravely voice of a much older man is heard. The effect is very similar to that of the artificially extended version of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly that outstayed its welcome on home video formats: for scenes where only an Italian language track had been recorded, elderly actors were press-ganged into booths to record comparable English lines. The disconnection is compounded by the rubbery action a digital Harrison Ford is then subjected to. His body is tossed around, and comes to no harm, in a house-cracking explosion while a noose dangles around his neck. While a shot of him skipping along the length of a moving train reads as oddly (and obnoxiously) weightless, as if the stunt was undertaken by a half-stuffed rag doll. 

These blips might be a bit more excusable when considering Marvel characters, who spring from two-dimensional cradles, but Indiana Jones is a series famous for exemplary examples of real-life tuck-and-roll stunt work. Therefore the disapproval is instant and intense. Strangely, the highlight of this opening sequence is that the digital trickery employed conjures up a style of photography knowingly similar to the day-for-night shooting seen in the men-on-a-mission films of the 1960s and 70s - a genre that Ford has priors with thanks to Guy Hamilton's Force 10 from Navarone. Fortunately this derailment does eventually end, hurling us forward in time to a New York in the midst of celebrating the first moon landing. Dial of Destiny may retain the ungainly rhythms established on the treasure train - a tempo better suited to films asking to be considered on their dramatic, rather than hyperbolic, components - but the film does at least perk up when considering a much older, and physically present, adventurer. 

This Indiana Jones is suffering through bereavement and an acute feeling of redundancy as his working life draws to a close: Jones' students no longer sit enraptured, batting their eyelids at him, they're bored and restless. It's difficult not to sympathise with their drifting attentions. Dial of Destiny barks at it audience, gussying up the film's would-be peaks with information and dangling stakes that it, often, has no real intention of delivering on. Mangold's film careens from set-piece to set-piece, never quite finding the right gag or angle to really make any of this death-defying stick: a tuk-tuk chase through endless Moroccan streets doesn't registers as anything other than a pile-up of green-screened dodgems. A misjudged self-seriousness also permeates Dial of Destiny, with the light, comedic touch of franchise originators George Lucas and (most especially) Steven Spielberg almost completely absent. What yuks remain are largely apportioned to Phoebe Waller-Bridge's flirtatious Helena and Ethann Isidore's Teddy, a pair of bickering grifters designed to conjure up pleasant memories of Karen Allen's Marion or Ke Huy Quan's long absent Short Round. 

Dial of Destiny would be a thankless chore then where it not for its concluding chapters. Once we are deep in an elevated and undiscovered tomb - one that lies above a hollowed-out tourist trap - the film (finally) begins to click into place. The uncanniness of the ancient computer, that has has been laboriously tracked throughout the piece, begins to wash back over proceedings, sprinkling incongruity and mind-bending uncertainty into the well-worn situations of a series premised on tomb raiding. Mads Mikkelsen's true believer Nazi is certain he has in his possession a tool that will bend to his own, genocidal whims. As with the Ark of the Covenant or the cup of Christ, this ancient treasure has an agenda of its own and is unwilling to deviate from that specific function. The resulting folly, as expected, chews up and spits out avaricious trespassers but not before it has allowed a bloodthirsty American, dressed up as a Gestapo officer, the opportunity to fire on the invading armies of the first Reich. Indiana Jones receives rare reward too, a fleeting chance to babble in the presence of human antiquity. In its final few moments Dial of Destiny diverges from the pack, heaping hosannas on a real-life scientific genius rather than the mist and fog of myth.