The first reactions are in for Harrison Ford’s fifth and final turn as Indiana Jones, The Dial of Destiny, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last night. And while we’re not in face-melting Nazi GIF territory, it’s safe to say that reviews have been mixed.
It’s been 15 years since Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, the previous entry into the whip-cracking, perma-smirking film franchise, opened in cinemas. Fans had to wait even longer for that one, arriving as it did almost 20 years after The Last Crusade, and while reviews at the time were fairly positive, cinemagoers found themselves less impressed. So, there have been hopes that the upcoming entry, with the welcome addition of Fleabag writer-actor Phoebe Waller-Bridge and welcome subtraction of Shia LaBeouf skidding around in a leather jacket and jaunty hat, would give Ford’s iconic character the kind of send-off his Eighties heyday demanded. Well, not quite.
In his review for Vanity Fair, critic Richard Lawson wrote that the 80-year-old’s film star charisma is still fully intact, but that the new adventure doesn’t come close to matching the original three films for quality. “In Dial of Destiny, one can feel the four credited screenwriters grasping at inspiration and coming up short,” he writes. “What they did manage to make would be perfectly fine as a standalone adventure film starring some other character, but it’s not worthy of the whip.”
Meanwhile, in a two-star review, Times film writer Kevin Maher called the $300 million project “a curious demonstration of how a Hollywood studio can fire nearly a third of a billion bucks at late 20th century nostalgia and get it so wrong,” going on to say that director James Mangold ultimately resorts to “plodding through the greatest hits” in scenes reminiscent of much better set-pieces in Temple of Doom and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
That’s not to say that there aren’t positives. Writing for the Evening Standard, Jo-Ann Titmarsh pours praise on “some genuinely moving scenes as we see this fantastic character finally getting ready to hang up his hat for the last time”. Meanwhile, Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw closes his three-star review with a nod to the impressive de-ageing tech employed in the story. “The finale is wildly silly and entertaining, and that Dial of Destiny is put to an audacious use which makes light of the whole question of defying ageing and the gravitational pull of time. Indiana Jones still has a certain old-school class."
You can make your own mind up when Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny arrives in cinemas on 30 June.
