'Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny' Is One Of The Best Of The Franchise Yet Still Feels Disposable

The $300 million, IP-driven tentpole feels impressively, lovingly crafted, but ultimately uninspired.

There’s something almost quaint about the tendency for IP-driven films, even while commanding the vast majority of the film industry’s total resources, to triangulate into a small handful of plots. One conceit stands above them all: time travel, which is, as with The Flash, both Spider-verses, the last Spider-Man, and a couple Avengers, the subject of the new Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny. At least in those comic book movies there was a commercial requirement the time travel was meant to facilitate (getting all the different iterations of that IP together in the same movie, and then having to explain how they got there). With Indiana Jones, it’s still the same old Indy in the same timeline, necessitating no multi-verse to explain how he got there or why he’s played by different actors, and yet the writers still chose time travel as the Macguffin. It’s almost as if so much of their work involved remembering stuff that the idea of time travel leapt straight from their subconscious.

“Remember Indiana Jones?” is the main theme of Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny as well as its entire reason for being. It’s at once a reasonably solid effort at an Indiana Jones movie, inarguably miles better than Crystal Skull and arguably one of the better ones, and yet also seems to really lack a soul of its own. It’s so busy trying to identify the necessary ingredients of an Indiana Jones movie (scary snakes! scary bugs! massive henchmen! foreign sidekicks! dusty tombs!) that it bypasses anything that feels unique or inspired. That it ends up being so similar to other big franchise movies almost by accident actually cheapens the IP it means to venerate.

Disney

Harrison Ford is old. He looks great for an 80-year-old, would that we could all live to be as old and look as great as him with his shirt off (honestly, incredible), and I don’t begrudge him wanting to keep making these movies. But are we so incapable of writing an exciting scene for an 80-year-old actor that doesn’t come down to fist fights or parkour? Sure, modern CGI and shooting techniques can make it look reasonably believable, to the theoretical human who wants to see an homage to Indiana Jones but knows nothing about when it came out or the star, but who are we really fooling? Dial of Destiny even has the balls to write a scene in which Indy complains about his shot knees, his crushed vertibrae, his dislocated shoulders, and blah blah blah, which he does while halfway up the stone wall of a tomb he’s scaled after punching out at least 10 bad guys and motorcrossing his way through three foreign cities. Was this the screenwriters giving voice to their own second thoughts?

The Indiana Jones franchise was always “a bit much” with all the car chases and gunfights and swashbuckling (which we accept as both a nod to the 40s serials on which it was based and a service to the target audience of 11-year-old boys), but Dial of Destiny is maybe 85% action scenes. Even my 10-year-old stepson, who so enjoys slapstick that he’ll rewind the Home Alone scenes of burglars getting bitten on the ass by dogs just to make sure the rest of us caught the joke, left the theaters saying “That was almost too much action.”

That’s certainly playing to director James Mangold’s strength, who, in movies like 3:10 to Yuma, Logan, and Ford V. Ferrari (the latter easily my favorite of his) has done nothing quite so well as make action scenes look expensive. Mangold can direct the absolute piss out of an action setpiece, whether it’s remotely plausible (or desirable) or not, and a lot of scenes in Dial of Destiny you think they probably could’ve solved some other way than running, punching, swinging, shooting, hopping from moving vehicles, etc. Something other than swashbuckling action would actually have been a nice contrast.

The plot concerns… well, the Dial of Destiny, a magical clock crafted by Archimedes, that an evil Nazi (Mads Mikkelsen) with a scar on his face wants to steal so he can go back in time and win WWII for the Germans. The year is 1969, and Dr. Voller has just helped the USA get to the moon, so now he can focus his full attention on the Dial. He has a CIA handler (played by Shaunette Renée Wilson), who is helping to protect Voller for the good of the US’s space program, and two henchman, one regular-sized, and played by Boyd Holbrook, the other a massive mountain of a man, who looks anywhere between 6’8” and 10 feet tall depending on the scene, played by Olivier Richters (whose bio says he’s 7’2”).

Holbrook and Richter’s characters are American, so it’s a little unclear why they’re so invested in the idea of un-losing the war for the Nazis, but we do see Holbrook’s character trying to teach himself German in the first scene, so apparently we’re meant to infer that they’re true believer, Nazi fifth columnist types. More importantly, huge Nazis are canon in the Indy franchise and that’s generally more important than character development in this movie.

Indy’s sidekick this time around is Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), Indy’s god daughter and the daughter of his old friend Dr. Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) from Oxford, whom we met in the first scene of the film, featuring Shaw and an AI de-aged Jones trying to keep a piece of the dial from the Nazis in the dying days of the war (which they manage with lots of punching and running around on top of trains). Obsessed with the dial like her father, Helena pulls Jones into her quest for it, supposedly because she means to sell it to the highest bidder. At least, that’s what she says she wants to do with it, but we never really believe her because she’s so cleary coded as a good guy. Voller and his men show up during Helena’s dial auction in Tangiers, setting off a three-party chase sequence through the streets, featuring Indy, Helena, Helena’s Moroccan former street urchin sidekick, Teddy (Ethann Isidore), the Nazis, and a Moroccan gangster said to be Helena’s ex-fiancee.

That is at least two too many characters for a chase sequence, and it goes on at least half-again longer than it needs to. And that’s Dial of Destiny in a nutshell. There’s a diving sequence shoehorning in Antonio Banderas and some scary eels, a tomb full of centipedes, and a speed run through some tunnels, complete with a Moroccan kid who previously couldn’t swim saving the day underwater. Why? Because that’s what Indiana Jones is! It is a movie franchise featuring all of those things!

Dial of Destiny does an impressive job going bigger and further over the top with every stunt without it ever feeling like a shark jump in the way Crystal Skull did. Both are ridiculous, but only Crystal Skull ever feels corny and cheap (the snake rope, Shia Labeouf swinging through the trees…). It also lacks the spark of humanity that Sean Connery brought to the otherwise campy Last Crusade.

Mangold has mastered “production values” in the generic sense better than maybe anyone since Speilberg, such that his scenes always feel expensive and impressive even when they’re kind of stupid on the face of it. Dial of Destiny reportedly cost almost $300 million to make, and looks it. It’s so studious about trying to define what Indiana Jones is — the plot a perfect “what if” story about ancient science that ultimately turns on an Encyclopedia Brown-level gotcha — that it feels a little rote and soulless. There’s nothing in it especially dull or bad or even uncharacteristic of an Indiana Jones movie (you never think “Indy would never do that!” or “an Indiana Jones movie would never have that!”) and even at two hours and 34 minutes (the longest of the franchise by almost 30 minutes) it doesn’t especially drag.

Dial of Destiny feels like it spent so much time trying to figure out what an Indiana Jones movie is that it never bothered figuring out what Dial of Destiny is. It catalogues without synthesizing. It feels like it has an expert’s understanding of what makes Indiana Jones Indiana Jones, but the irony is that by simply hanging around so long, this franchise has become just another franchise. And so Dial of Destiny bumbles through almost every trope of the IP-driven franchise tentpole circa 2023 — time travel, a de-aged actor doing stunts he has no business doing, an 150-minute-plus runtime, younger hipper actors brought in to give it the sheen of cool, cameos from all the old-timers. That it feels like everything else does now (albeit in a notably breezy, expensive-looking sort of way) just ends up making it feel disposable.

Grade: B

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