Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny film review — Harrison Ford rolls back the years with swagger

“It’s not the years, honey. It’s the mileage.” So Indiana Jones memorably said after another bruising escapade in Raiders of the Lost Ark. That was 1981. These days, let’s face it, it’s both. Harrison Ford, returning aged 80 to the role that made him a leading man, acknowledged as much as he tearfully accepted an honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last night and watched a highlight reel of his career. “They say when you’re close to death you see your life pass before your eyes . . . ” he noted sardonically looking up at the screen, the old deadpan wit and wonky smile still roadworthy.

It seemed fitting that the film we were assembled to see was Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which is both breathless action romp and elegiac acknowledgment of the unstoppable march of history. The mood in the Grand Théâtre Lumière was generous, warmed perhaps by the knowledge that this, surely, is the last time we’ll see Ford don the iconic hat and whip. We all wished for something better than 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and for the first hour at least, this fifth entry in the franchise, directed by James Mangold, rewarded that hope.

We find Jones back in his 1940s pomp, Ford digitally de-aged convincingly enough to make it easy to digest the comfort food of our hero biffing Nazis, skipping along the top of train carriages and leaping on and off motorcycles. This section resembles a reprise of Raiders, Mads Mikkelsen taking the role of sneeringly arrogant Nazi treasure-hunter, the two men fighting over a biblical artefact, in this case the Lance of Longinus, said to have pierced Christ’s skin. But why settle for one MacGuffin when you can have two? Soon a second prize moves into view: the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek astronomical device designed by Archimedes, between revolutionising maths and taking baths. There will be more of that later — rather too much more.

But first we check in on Indy in 1969 New York where he is rudely awoken by the opening blare of “Magical Mystery Tour” (that couldn’t be an omen, could it?). Recently divorced from Marion Ravenwood and freshly retired from Hunter College, he is finally ready to hang up that famous fedora. But pugnacious goddaughter Phoebe Waller-Bridge has other ideas, drawing him into an outlandish scheme that soon has him running from gunfire.

Under the circumstances, Ford carries off the highjinks with some swagger and the double act with Waller-Bridge has brio, even if it has more than a shade of The Force Awakens, which paired Ford’s Han Solo with another young Brit, Daisy Ridley. Otherwise the formula is more or less unchanged, the only nod to contemporary concerns being that German Nazis are now joined by American ones.

It’s when Jones mounts a horse and rides it into the New York subway that you sense the film may be getting ready to jump the shark. And so it proves. The second hour is increasingly silly and overstuffed with loveable old faces — John Rhys-Davies’s Sallah, Karen Allen’s Marion — and new ones — not just Waller-Bridge’s Helena but light-fingered scamp Teddy (Ethann Isidore), an update of Temple of Doom’s Short Round, and Antonio Banderas as a Spanish diver who has barely surfaced before he disappears again.

Meanwhile the Antikythera storyline jostles for screen time with a rehash of greatest hits: a barnstorming chase through a Moroccan market square, the decoding of cryptic ancient tablets, a shrieking heroine covered in insects. So devoted are the producers to questionable fan-service that you half expect a boulder to come rolling into view. That would almost be preferable to what actually transpires in the last half-hour. It might spoil the film to reveal it, but it spoils the film anyway.

Which isn’t to say Dial of Destiny isn’t fun — a good deal of it is. What’s vexing is the nagging feeling that there’s a much better Indiana Jones film buried in there somewhere. But it would require a feat of archaeology — or at least a rewrite and some judicious editing — to excavate it.

★★★☆☆

In UK and US cinemas from June 30

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