Harrison Ford’s last crusade as Indy… and he’s still got it! BRIAN VINER reviews Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny
INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY (12A, 154 mins)
Rating:
Verdict: Old hat
RUBY GILLMAN, TEENAGE KRAKEN (PG, 90 mins)
Rating:
Verdict: Lively animation
Quite a few years have passed since I stood next to Harrison Ford in a hotel lobby during the Cannes Film Festival, at first mistaking him for someone older and frailer than a world-famous movie star.
Wearing a racy earring in a transparent attempt to look more hip than hip replacement, he also wore the faintly bewildered expression of a man who’d turned up for a Harrison Ford lookalike contest on the wrong day.
Yet seeing him in the slightly mottled flesh is not like watching Ford on screen. He will turn 81 in a couple of weeks but the camera continues to adore him. In his valedictory outing as the world’s most famous and fearless fictional archaeologist, with the help of stuntmen and some deft touches from director James Mangold, he just about pulls it off as a superannuated action hero.
Boldly, he also pulls off his shirt, revealing the once-taut, now sagging torso of a reasonably fit octogenarian that dares us to look in the mirror ourselves, those of us who remember going to the cinema in 1981 to see Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
Yes, it’s 42 years since we first met Indy, so battered fedora hats off to him for his longevity. Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny is the fifth and surely the last film in the franchise, the first not to be directed by Steven Spielberg, but not the worst. That was 2008’s disappointing Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull.
In his valedictory outing as the world’s most famous and fearless fictional archaeologist, Harrison Ford (pictured) just about pulls it off as a superannuated action hero
On the whole, the new film is a disappointment too, but that’s not Ford’s fault. He’s still a compelling movie actor, still able to command the screen with that slow, twisted smile and a minimum of fuss and flamboyance.
His sidekick in this film is played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whose performance I quite liked on first viewing but, having seen it again, I think she’s probably miscast. She has more than sufficient charisma for the small screen but somehow not quite enough for the big one.
The story starts in wartime, with Indy (a digitally de-aged Ford) fighting the Nazis for a powerful artefact, the titular Dial Of Destiny, created in the third century BC by none other than Archimedes. But the dial has been prudently broken in half. Only when both pieces are joined will it do as clever Archimedes intended, propelling its owner through space and time.
We are ourselves then pitched forward to 1969, with Indy now a world-weary professor in New York City, getting irritated by his youthful neighbours playing The Beatles at high volume. But he’s about to embark on his own magical mystery tour after being reunited with his goddaughter, Helena (Waller-Bridge), whose father (Toby Jones) was a trusted academic colleague.
He only recalls Helena as a little girl, but now she’s all grown up and, behind her jolly hockeysticks exterior, something of a rascal. It’s never made at all clear why the apple has fallen so far from the tree but, anyway, unlike her dear old dad she is interested in ancient artefacts purely for their monetary value, to which end she has a sidekick of her own, a young Arab pickpocket (Ethann Isidore).
Her roguishness makes it pretty clear from the outset that she and her godfather are not about to get it together romantically, thank heavens, but they still make a generally unconvincing double act, not helped by his strained insistence on calling her ‘Wombat’, the name he knew her by as a kid.
Still, there ensue all the set pieces you would expect from an Indiana Jones film as the goodies, semi-goodies and downright baddies (led by Mads Mikkelsen as a German rocket scientist) all crisscross the Mediterranean in search of the missing half of the dial, building to a truly preposterous time-travel finale.
There are some nicely choreographed chases, and inevitably a dark underground chamber with boulders triggered by secret levers that roll away leading to even darker underground chambers, but at the world premiere in Cannes last month, I can’t say I was tugged anywhere near the edge of my seat.
That glitzy screening was preceded by the festival’s classy tribute to Ford, a slick montage of his best-known screen performances which, holding hands with his wife Calista Flockhart, he watched with tears in his eyes. Really, this picture is the same kind of exercise: a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses montage of Indy’s greatest hits. It is slickly packaged, yet never quite amounts to a top-class adventure film in its own right.
Grandmamah (played by Jane Fonda) and Ruby Gillman (Lana Condor) in DreamWorks Animation’s Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, directed by Kirk DeMic
I was much more entertained by Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, a DreamWorks animation that successfully marries a classic high-school coming-of-age story with that of a family of benign sea monsters, or krakens, attempting to pass themselves off as ordinary landlubbers.
Ruby (voiced by Lana Condor) is a teenager under strict orders from her mother (Toni Collette) not to go anywhere near the ocean, little knowing that if she does, she will turn into an enormous kraken. Ruby understandably wonders why, given the evident perils of seawater, they moved to the town of Oceanside. ‘We needed to stay moist,’ her mum explains.
Unable to stay out of salt water, Ruby finds herself in hot water, but at least gets to understand the family predicament with help from her ocean-dwelling grandmother (Jane Fonda). It’s daft, but also loud, colourful and fun.
- A review of Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny first ran on May 19.
Shiv’s adventures with Alice and the white rabbit
The Australian actress Sarah Snook, so wonderful as devious, damaged Shiv in the TV drama Succession, takes on a different kind of dark role in the new Netflix release Run Rabbit Run (15, 100 mins, ★★★✩✩).
Run Rabbit Run is a psychological horror film starring Sarah Snook, Greta Scacchi and Lily LaTorre
It’s a psychological horror film in which Snook plays a single mum whose seven-year-old daughter, Mia (Lily LaTorre), starts to freak her out by appearing to believe that she is the reincarnation of Sarah’s long-lost sister Alice — who disappeared, aged seven.
Also freaking her out is a white rabbit, which has appeared mysteriously on the doorstep and is promptly adopted by Mia, whose pet name happens to be Bunny. There’s plenty of good stuff here (including Greta Scacchi as Sarah’s addled mum), and Snook’s habitual excellence is matched every step of the way by young LaTorre, a real find.
But The Babadook (2014) set benchmarks for Aussie horror that Daina Reid’s film never reaches — and personally I found it hard to be spooked by a rabbit.
La Syndicaliste tells the story of Irish woman Maureen Kearney (Isabelle Huppert) who became a powerful trade unionist in France
La Syndicaliste (15, 121 mins, ★★★✩✩) is a French-language film based on the true story of Maureen Kearney, a feisty Irish woman who settled in France and became a powerful trade unionist. When she uncovered a sneaky plan to sell nuclear technology to the Chinese, Kearney was targeted in many ways, culminating in a violent assault in her own home.
But did the assault happen, or did she make it up to discredit her enemies?
That’s the essence of the story, told in rather lumbering fashion even though the lead is the always-magnetic Isabelle Huppert.
It was an odd decision to wipe out her character’s Irishness yet still call her Kearney, but never mind: Huppert is splendid.
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