Indiana Jones: Dialling back time one more time

Harrison Ford turns 81 on July 13 and for the better part of five decades he’s had one of the movies’ most successful and fortunate leading-man runs.

He’s been in the enviable position of having starred in two of the biggest and most treasured movie franchises — Star Wars and Indiana Jones — as well as starring in the hugely influential sci-fi Blade Runner. In the case of Star Wars and Blade Runner, Ford has also had the unique and rare opportunity to be involved in saying a proper goodbye to his characters.

It’s an opportunity he now hopes to capitalise on for the globe-striding, bullwhip-branding, floppy-hat-donning ancient artefact hound Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the fifth and supposedly final instalment of the franchise.

The Indy films enjoyed their greatest heights of popular appeal and box-office success in the Reagan, late Cold-War era of the 1980s when, thanks to the particular mythmaking storytelling talents of the idea’s originator George Lucas and the action-adventure screen stylings of director Steven Spielberg — the creation of the golden-age Hollywood B-movie serial-inspired, Nazi-whacking Jones combined with the reliable strong, quiet but decidedly masculine rugged charm of Ford gave audiences satisfyingly old-school family-friendly adventure escapism that’s been passed on through generations.

From 1981’s debut Raiders of the Lost Ark to 1989’s Last Crusade the initial trio of films stood as a profitable and hard-not-to-like tribute to good, old- fashioned adventure and a woefully misleading recruitment tool for archaeology departments around the world.

Having originally signed a five-picture deal, Lucas and Spielberg failed to convince Ford that a fourth film involving extraterrestrials would be worth his stepping back into the role in the ’90s, until in 2008 for no apparent reason other than fulfilling the commitment of the original deal, 66-year-old Ford returned in the Spielberg-directed Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which saw Indy battling Soviet nasties in a desperate race to track down an alien artefact.

The film bombed with audiences and critics, and it seemed that Ford’s feeling that the whole thing had been a bad idea back in the ’90s was one he should have heeded and that the Indy team had learnt the hard way that their creation was very much a child of the ’80s and should be put to rest.

But, like the character’s wanderlust and need for adventure, it seems that Ford’s desire for a proper ending to the envisioned five-part story of Indiana Jones just wouldn’t die. After 15 years of searching for the right story he finally settled on one written by screenwriter brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth that the star felt made the brave decision to confront rather than flee from the idea of Indiana Jones’ age and mortality.

Spielberg wished Ford luck, having learnt his lesson with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and the directing reins were handed to James Mangold — the reliable director of films such as Walk the Line, Logan and Ford v Ferrari — who promised that his love of the franchise and Ford would ensure that Indiana Jones’ last hurrah was in safe hands.

Dial of Destiny begins with a nostalgic and overlong prologue set on a train full of Nazis in the dying days of World War 2 where the AI de-aged Ford and his nebbish sidekick Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) are in a race against time to save a precious ancient artefact from the clutches of the Hitler-fearing mad scientist Dr Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) in a tried and trusted Indy formula opening.

Then 27 years later and we’re back with Dr Jones, who is recently divorced, shabbily passed out in a sofa in his small New York apartment and going through the motions of teaching archaeology to a 1960s’ generation who are more interested in the recent moon landing than they are in the ancient wonders of the genius of Archimedes.

As he’s about to retire from his job and perhaps drink himself into oblivion, Indy’s morbid self-pitying, late-life plans are rudely interrupted by a ghost from his past — the now all-grown up Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), daughter of his deceased friend Basil, who is a little too keen on enlisting her godfather’s help in locating the other half of a mythical time-travelling Archimedes artefact that it soon turns out is also the major interest of the still conniving and very much alive Nazi scientist Dr Voller.

What follows is a messily plotted, nostalgia-heavy mishmash of safe-bet highlights from the early films that offers us the adequately pleasing sight of Ford putting on the hat, picking up the bullwhip and smacking some Nazi butt one last time.

Overall though, and for most of its overlong two-and-a-half-hour duration, this send-off offers little in the way of demonstrating that Indiana Jones and the films that made him such a totem of 20th-century popular culture do much now to move the dial of his destiny forward or convince us that he is more a man for all seasons than a man of his time.

• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is on circuit.