Weekend Watch - Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
John Williams’s excellent score and some fun action set pieces only go so far in elevating Dial of Destiny’s half-hearted story and middling character development to a place of being watchable and enjoyable.
Welcome back to the Weekend Watch where each week we take a look at a new piece of film or television media and give it a rating, review, and recommendation. This week’s topic, as voted by the blog’s Instagram followers, is James Mangold’s entry in the Indiana Jones saga, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which released this weekend in theaters from Disney and Lucasfilm. The film finds Harrison Ford’s adventuring archaeologist in a race against Nazi holdovers, the CIA, and his goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) to claim the titular time-traveling artifact that was invented thousands of years ago by famed mathematician, Archimedes. Along with Waller-Bridge’s enigmatic role, the film also features Mads Mikkelsen and Boyd Holbrook as the true villains and contains cameos from Antonio Banderas, Toby Jones, Karen Allen, and John Rhys-Davies. Let’s get into it.
Letter Grade: C+; it’s technically an Indiana Jones film, but it’s missing something that the original three definitely had.
Should you Watch This Film? Maybe, if you need a relatively family-friendly action film, this checks that box, but I’m not sure that it’s got much of anything else going for it.
Why?
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny follows much more in the footsteps of its most recent predecessor than the films that came before, giving audiences a grizzled and hesitant Jones thrown into an adventure through connections that we’ve only just been introduced to before diving into a lively but not overly high-stakes second act that ends with a ridiculously over-the-top climax. The music and action are well-executed and fun, but the story feels forced, the villain never feels fully committed to his own mission, and the whole thing leaves you asking why they felt the need to make it.
The action sequences are all pretty solid, playing with the typical Indiana Jones bits, giving Ford one last chance to bust out the whip and fedora (but no gun for most of the film for whatever reason) and get himself into and out of tough spots with a solid blend of suspense, fun, and adrenaline. The opening sequence (taking place back at the end of World War II) is probably the weakest action sequence, struggling to make us believe that we’re seeing a young Harrison Ford when every time he speaks, the aged-down man sounds like an octogenarian. They get better from there with a fun little chase through the streets of 1960s Chicago, a wild tuk-tuk chase around Tangier, before capping everything with maybe the most ridiculous and biggest action set piece in any Indiana Jones film at the end. It might not work for everyone because of how insane it really is, but if you can suspend some disbelief (and why wouldn’t you while watching a film about a globetrotting archaeologist fighting Nazis in the 1960s), you’ll find yourself enjoying it despite your probable frustration with the rest of the film that isn’t John Williams’s score.
Dial of Destiny’s two biggest issues are its hero and its villain. For the hero (Indiana Jones), most of his choices and developments are externally motivated, not coming from his actual desire to see or do anything but from his obligations to characters and ideas that we haven’t really encountered at all before this film. Even when he does try to make his own choices, Jones is coopted or circumvented by other characters, rendering those moments more as comic relief than dramatic character moments. It’s not so much that Harrison Ford does a bad job of executing the character – he fits well in the role still as it has evolved to age with him – but more that the story is written with Jones as an archetype than as an actual character. Similarly, Mikkelsen’s villain Dr. Voller feels like two villains rolled into one and not well-developed in either facet. On one hand, he’s a scientist devoted to claiming the Dial for science and his own personal use. On the other, he’s a Nazi who dreams of bringing back the Third Reich despite never seeming to espouse any of the ideals of the Nazis until the film’s final act – even in his introduction at the end of the Second World War, he feels more like a scientist swept up by the Nazis than an actual Nazi himself. For the first two acts, you feel like Indy’s facing off against one villain, but then in the climax, the villain is reduced to a literal image of a Nazi officer because that’s who Indiana faced off against in the best films in the franchise. The whole story feels like somebody watched the Indiana Jones films and then had to write another film in the franchise, as opposed to actually wanting to write another film.
John Williams’s excellent score and some fun action set pieces only go so far in elevating Dial of Destiny’s half-hearted story and middling character development to a place of being watchable and enjoyable. It’s an okay film made worse by the greatness of the first three films in its franchise that is fine for a popcorn flick but not much else. Watch it if you want, but don’t expect to get a game-changing blockbuster for the ages.