Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Ever seen someone ask a question to which you already know the answer? In this case, it's, "Whatever happened to Indiana Jones?"

The answer, if you were a fan of the short-lived but beloved The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles TV series, was that he lived into his 90s (losing an eye in the process) and spent his twilight years with his daughter and grandkids, telling stories of his adventures in the first half of the 20th century. There was something deeply pleasing about the idea that, after decades of Nazi-smashing, Indy got to hang up the whip. It was a little like watching Captain America finally get that last dance with Agent Carter.

But that history has been thoroughly washed away by multiple forces. First, the series was reedited to remove the wraparounds featuring old Indy (including wiping out George Hall's lovable performance, much as George Lucas wiped out Sebastian Shaw's Anakin Skywalker force ghost for his Star Wars special editions). Then daughter Sophie disappeared for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in favor of a son, the ever-contentious Mutt. Then, the final blow: Harrison Ford went on his retirement tour, revisiting the characters that made him a household name.

That tour continues with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, his first adventure without the involvement of series creators George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Instead, it's James Mangold (Logan, 3:10 to Yuma), who gets to pick the essential artifact to get Indy back under the fedora. It's the Antikythera Mechanism, a fabled gizmo designed by Archimedes that Wernher von Braun knockoff Dr. Schmidt (a somnolent Mikkelsen) is convinced can help him rewrite history. So it's up to Henry Jones Jr. to stop him. First, in a murky digitally de-aged precredit raid on a Nazi antiquities cache at the tail end of World War II, with only deskbound academic Basil Shaw (Jones) to help him. Then, three decades later, a decrepit, divorced, retired, and embittered Jones goes globe-trotting with Shaw's daughter and his goddaughter, antiquities thief Helena (Waller-Bridge, doing a mix of her normal plummy toff routine and "Ain't I a stinker"-era Bugs Bunny) to head off Schmidt's plans to save the Reich.

As an Indiana Jones film, this is either the worst or second-worst, depending on how much you enjoyed the wild, weird, UFOs-and-Red-Scares energy of Crystal Skull. But maybe that's not the way to look at Dial of Destiny. Maybe it's more fitting to examine it as part of the Ford victory lap sequence. It's clearly a far weaker film than the excellent Blade Runner 2049, in which Ford's return as Rick Deckard was up there with Paul Newman reopening Eddie Felson's pool cue case 25 years after The Hustler for The Color of Money. It's also a far better film than J.J. Abrams' execrable fan fiction, Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens. But when Han Solo walked onto the deck of the Millennium Falcon, Ford brought back a little of the old magic, and that's somehow missing here. In part it's because Mangold never finds a way to integrate the bowlegged retiree academic with the rip-roaring adventurer. What used to be delicious incongruity now just feels disjointed, a sensation clearly amplified every time he breaks out the CGI. For a series that reveled in on-location action sequences, Mangold's chases and punch-ups feel stage-bound, unreal, almost like rehearsals. They're also overly long and repetitive: Somehow the editing team of Michael McCusker, and Andrew Buckland, and Dirk Westervelt studied everything from Michael Kahn (who cut all four earlier adventures) except how to retain any sense of breathless energy.

Maybe that's where Dial of Destiny truly lacks its heart. Indy was never just about two-fisted bravado – indeed, like all the best Ford characters, he took as many punches as he handed out. He was the smartest adventurer, and it's a missed opportunity in the script by Mangold, Crystal Skull writer David Koepp, and siblings Jez and John-Henry Butterworth (Ford v Ferrari) not to have him outwit rather than outfight them.

Or maybe it's just (and brace yourself for some shocking news) that James Mangold is just not as good a director as Steven Spielberg. He tries to be Spielberg, that's undoubted – arguably too hard and in all the wrong ways. There's none of Spielberg's verbal wit or the astonishing shot composition that helped the rest of the films flourish so far above their gutsy, 1930s action serial roots. Dial of Destiny feels like a less skilled hand tracing over the work of his favorite artists: The lines may be their own, but you'll always see the superior work underneath, overshadowing it and making you wish you could see the original instead. It's not a straight copy, but trying to turn street urchin and young con man Teddy (played with gusto by newcomer Isidore) into a new Short Round just makes you miss Short Round. The same is very much true with Boyd Holbrook as Klaber, a crew-cut Southern boy with a taste for the Reich: He's not trying to be Ronald Lacey's memorable cackling psychopath, Herr Toht, but then again, he's no Herr Toht.

It's such a fun-free slog that it's hard to raise any sense of excitement in a final act that may be the most fantastical in the franchise so far (and this is a series that had the literal wrath of God incinerating Nazis). Yet Mangold almost saves the day in the end: Or rather, Ford does. After spending so much of the film feeling like he's being composited into the action, he finally gets to feel real again. He still may not get that suburban happy ending, but at least it's a moment to say goodbye to Indy the right way.