So, there's definitely stuff to like in
Dial of Destiny. Ford still looks good in the outfit, and still has a great growl. Pheobe Waller-Bridge is a dynamic screen presence, and could make a fine archeological heroine in a movie of her own. James Mangold is a skilled director, and with a huge production budget, the movie looks great.
But.
I've said it again and again: the person behind the camera is less important than the quality of the script being shot, and this just isn't a good script. Indy has apparently spent the last 25 years believing his half of the Archimedes dial is of no particular danger or importance, as he keeps it in university storage, not a bank vault, and freely hands it over to a goddaughter who openly tells him she's trying to reunite it with its other half. But, as soon as the baddies capture it, he does a 180-turn, and insists he and Helena have to work together to stop them from completing the same mission, despite having no reason to have changed his own beliefs about the artifact. (Also, this insistence that he and Helena cooperate marks the end of the first act... roughly halfway through the runtime. There's your first clue another draft was needed.)
The idea of a Nazi going back in time to fix the Reich's mistakes is an inspired plot device, but Indy doesn't fully learn about the plan until the start of the third act, which is much too late to establish dramatic stakes. Moreover, the time travel mechanism has to be better established then "a few people take a glance at half of an ancient dial, and are immediately convinced, despite
no evidence whatsover, that it's a workable device for such a feat." On the one hand, I appreciate that the Archimedes dial is scientific in nature, but on the other hand, there really needed to be either some supernatural basis for the idea of being able to locate/predict fissures in time, even if those fissures occur naturally, or a practical demonstration of the dial's utility/accuracy. (Also, never mind continental drift, which is negligible over a 2,000-year period, these apparently completely natural fissures entirely compensate for planetary/galactic orbits, I guess? Very thoughtful of them!)
Speaking of which, if Voller is so hell-bent on retrieving the dial, why has he not looked up Indy before now? Despite his government contacts, did he have no idea that the guy he already fought is alive and well, and teaching archaeological history in NYC? Is it just massively convenient that he learned about Indy's existence when he happened to be staying in the immediate vicinity? He must have known about Helena because his goons were following her, right? That's why they arrived at the college? Did he never learn who her godfather was? Just how shoddy was his team's intel??
So much for the plot, now for the characters. It's
wildly out of character for Mutt to have enlisted to fight in Vietnam; it would have been much more effective had he died while on an expedition
with Indy. Killing him off via backstory is a fine choice in of itself, but sending him to the war just makes not only him seem like a total dope, but Indy, too, for not talking him out of it - which, again, given his character, should have been the easiest thing in the world.
As for Helena...
oy. She doesn't work as a character, because she's really two characters: an unlikable, amoral rogue in the first act, and a devoted and loving goddaughter in the third act. The audience can only guess that bonding with Indy during their second-act tomb raiding inspired her to reform her errant ways, because there certainly isn't any evident justification for this change.
More quibbles: the kid character is completely unnecessary, and shouldn't have been included. Also: no offense to cabbies, but I'd expect more from Sallah than mere cab-driving from a guy as intelligent and brave as him after being in the States for ~20 years. (Couldn't he have become a formidable history professor, also?) And, there's just no good reason, other than lazy writing, for Voller to appear in the prologue if there's no justification for his instantaneous belief in the dial's power - and there isn't. (Granted, it
does set up Voller's distrust for Hitler's poor decision-making, but the Führer's blunders are already legendary in number and scale, so that hardly seems necessary.)
The movie's action is... okay. All the major sequences drag on much too long, and without any injuries or sense of exhaustion to give them the edge a sequel to
Raiders should have.
As for the idea of Indy retiring in Ancient Syracuse... to my surprise, I really liked it, and felt it justified the otherwise
b-a-n-a-n-a-s plot swerve of actually traveling two thousand years into the past. But, by bringing (forcing) Indy back to the present, it merely amounted to a bananas plot swerve for the sake of an action climax. What's more, it made Voller into a total idiot, by rushing into a fissure on blind faith that not only would this dial have perfect accuracy, but that he understood how it works/how to read it, despite never having possessed it for more than a few minutes in the dark. It might have been one thing had Indy somehow tricked everyone into going to the wrong time, but Voller ended up just playing himself.
Finally, I groaned aloud when Marion showed up just to put a nice bow on the series, because the series
just did that last time, and after making her a major character, rather than a 'member berry cameo. If the movie had allotted, say, 10 minutes otherwise given to the endless action sequences to showing them struggling to hold their relationship together after Mutt's death, their reunion might have been more effective, but to me at least, bringing her in for only the last scene felt like an unearned flashing
"SURPRISE! APPLAUSE!" sign. Their scene replaying the
Raiders dialogue did somewhat redeem said ending, however.
In conclusion,
Indiana Jones and Hermione's Time-Turner is merely mid, and too damn long. It's better than
Skull, and, though much less interesting, far more tolerable than the headache-inducing
Doom. But it lacks
Last Crusade's goofy charm and emotionally earned ending, let alone
Raiders' genuine greatness.
Now, instead of rebooting/recasting Indy, can't we just come up with an entirely new 1930s archaeological adventurer? It worked for
The Mummy '99, which is still the second-best archaeological adventure flick ever made.
