Last hurrah
Ticket Stubs #5: Indiana Jones gets a bolshie female sidekick in ‘Dial of Destiny’, his fifth and final movie.
From there it’s a jaunt to Morocco, then Greece, then Sicily, then a destination you don’t often see on Trivago. Don’t these people know there’s a climate emergency on?
Ticket Stubs is a movie column reviewing new and not-so-new releases, Hollywood classics, nostalgic trash, and more obscure cinematic fare. This is Ticket Stubs #5.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
James Mangold, 2023
If we are to believe The Discourse, the fifth Indiana Jones movie is woke.
Said wokery is demonstrated by the decision to give our ageing archeologist a younger, spunkier, femaler partner in the shape of Phoebe Waller-Bridge — and what a shape: the statuesque Brit is a ceruse-cheeked study in classical beauty. She resembles an Elizabethan noblewoman broken free from a bulbous bodice, her limber frame darting along the hectic backstreets of Tangiers, leaping on and off speeding sedans, and slinking through the treacherous crevices of Sicilian caves. Waller-Bridge gives Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, available to buy now on Amazon Prime Video, an energy that is both sleek and punchy, and if the tone of her performance is uneven it is only because the character is choppily written.
Waller-Bridge plays Helena Shaw, Indy’s hitherto unseen, unmentioned goddaughter, the progeny of Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), also never seen or mentioned before now. The longer a movie series runs, the more it must rely on distant relations and improbable friends to keep the story fresh. Basil, a prologue sequence shows us, was a wartime associate of Indy. In the final days of the Third Reich, Basil and Indy encounter half a hunk of the Antikythera, an ancient orrery said to have been designed by Archimedes and then split in two when he realised its terrible power: the Antikythera can open a portal that allows the operator to travel through time. They acquire the half-dial from Nazi scientist Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), who is then swept from the roof of a hurtling train.
Jump to 1969 and man has just taken one giant leap on the Moon. Dr Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is a grouchy day-drinker, separated from his wife after the death of their son Mutt, played by Shia LaBeouf in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Indy yells at his flower-children neighbours and their trippy hippie music and is unenthusiastically teaching his final few archeology classes before retiring from Hunter College. Helena accosts him and proposes they team up to unite the two halves of the dial and complete her late father’s scholarly work. Before they can get anywhere, they run up against a squad of goons who may or may not be ex-Agency and answer to a Dr Schmidt, a nuclear physicist responsible for the recent Moon landing. Naturally, he is not what, or rather who, he seems.
From there it’s a jaunt to Morocco, then Greece, then Sicily, then a destination you don’t often see on Trivago. Don’t these people know there’s a climate emergency on? Surely, in this day and age, all these emissions are ecologically irresponsible when Indy could do his adventuring via Zoom. Yet Ford, 80 when this was shot, still manages to keep pace. His face is jowlier and scowlier but the movie leans into his advancing years, so it’s never entirely improbable that an octogenarian is commandeering horses and galloping through a Moon-landing parade. (Glasgow doubles for New York City.) There are a few noticeable insert shots where his face suddenly appears in scenes that have otherwise been handled by stunt doubles, but Ford would hardly be the first older star to rely on that. No, he may have slowed down but he’s remarkably agile for his age.
As for the indictment that Dial of Destiny humiliates Ford or is a social-justice-warrior polemic against the inadequacies of white men, you really have to want to see it and some really want to see it. This dynamic is the source of the allegations of wokery, particularly in relation to Waller-Bridge’s character, but the intergenerational banter goes both ways and the messaging is kept to a minimum. Yes, there is a political undercurrent — this is a series where Nazis are the main villains; of course it’s political — but this is not a movie interested in beating its audience about the head with Social Commentary about Issues. Admittedly, near the end, you’re led to believe they’re going to pull a No Time to Die on you but they draw back at the last second.
Neither critics nor audiences have taken to this movie and it is said to be redundant or dull or meandering. Not a bit of it. Dial of Destiny barely stays in one place long enough for a location tag. It’s all pace, never outstaying its welcome. True, it is a rehash of everything the series has already done, and that might be what kept audiences at home, but this is a movie that will find its audience on streaming and Saturday afternoon television. There is much enjoyment to be taken from hating Mikkelsen’s boo-hiss villain — as TV’s Hannibal amply demonstrates, the man does evil damn well — and the high-speed tuk-tuk chase through Tangiers is edited with a rhythmic beat. Shaunette Renée Wilson is terrific as one of Schmidt’s hired guns. There are echoes of Cleopatra Jones in her performance, which makes it all the more inexplicable that her involvement in the plot is kept to a minimum.
Dial of Destiny isn’t dull and it isn’t woke but its writing is flat when it comes to character. The screenplay can’t seem to decide whether Helena’s a cynical money-grabber or a devoted daughter and so she’s one at some points and the other elsewhere. It is odd to have gone to the trouble of creating these new characters only to let them into the final draft without knowing their motivations. Then again, there is only one character who truly matters in these movies and it is satisfying to see him, his fedora and his whip get one last adventure.