"....What makes Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny bearable and occasionally even touching is that Harrison Ford proves indestructible. He counterpoints lickety-split reflexes with pungent delayed reactions, and displays his paradoxical signature—efficient yet larger-than-life expressions that generate surprising emotions and intensities. “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage,” says the youthful Indy in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now, 42 years later, the octogenarian Ford’s sags and crags add deep mellow tones to Indy’s semi-streetwise, semi-academic wit and wisdom. It’s too bad that this less-is-more pro gets snagged in a more-is-more production.........
Mangold and his co-writers (Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, David Koepp) mistakenly rely on sketchy, melodramatic flashbacks to root the relationship between Indy and Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), his goddaughter. The movie’s dialogue can scarcely be deciphered amid the general clangor on the soundtrack. The words I did hear didn’t make me curious about the ones I missed. This is what passes for a clever exchange—Indy to Nazi: “You stole it!” Nazi to Indy: “You stole it.” Helena to both: “Then I stole it! It’s called capitalism.”
To be fair, not even Spielberg’s sequels recovered Raiders’s scrappy spirit: the franchise turned into an expensive game of “can-we-top-this?” But Mangold’s action sequences are so overthought and under-felt that they seem to go on forever........
Mangold stages promising variations on Spielberg’s action scenes—like snake-hater Indy descending into an eel-infested sea—but shoots them so flatly or murkily that they never pay off.......
Only one woman registers as Indy’s equal: Marion, his estranged wife. Karen Allen plays her with limpidity and grace (the opposite of Waller-Bridge’s archness). Allen’s 11th-hour entrance is infinitely poignant. But it’s too little, too late."
https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/time-b ... my52jgONOE
