INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY (2023)

Steven Spielberg threw in the towel (or was it threw up his hands?) on this eighth INDIANA JONES film, handing off to James Mangold.*  And a quick glance at the running time raises immediate concern as the film is nearly 40 minutes longer than any previous INDY; bound to feel overstuffed.  So it proves right from the start, as everyone seems determined to fold in a variation on a favorite bit chosen from across the whole series.  The prologue hews close to LOST ARK’s template.  Later, a tough urchin tags along a la TEMPLE OF DOOM (second and worst in the series).  Tomboyish sidekick?  Enter Phoebe Waller-Bridge.  And of course plenty of Nazis, snakes (or reasonable facsimiles thereof), plus weapons that boomerang back on guys good & bad.  It’s not an undoable idea, LOST CRUSADE, third in the series (second-best), managed something similar in its zippy prologue with River Phoenix as young Indy, doing a sort of origin orgy of Indy aversions.  Now, Harrison Ford plays his own younger self (heavy CGI very good!) running thru a WWII endgame (heavy CGI not so good), before jumping ahead to late ‘60s NYC and the search for ‘the other half’ of Archimedes antiquity time machine.  Fortunately, there’s enough goodwill left in the series to let us invest time, energy & sentiment in all the shenanigans, even when obvious mistakes are made.  Why have the tough street kid murder a bad guy when he could have simply swum thru a gap in an underwater gate too tiny for the big brute to fit thru?  For that matter, why bother hiring Antonio Banderas for a glorified cameo?  Remember when Shia LeBeouf was being set up to take over the franchise?  Bet he’d like to use the Dial of Destiny on his career.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK:  *Eight?  Not six?  The reasoning can be found in our LAST CRUSADE post.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2022/12/indiana-jones-and-last-crusade-1989.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  There’s another template being used here (from prologue to finish), an ominous one.  Preston Sturges’s unhappy attempt to revive Harold Lloyd’s THE FRESHMAN/’25 as a middle-aged drudge via THE SIN OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK (aka MAD WEDNESDAY)/’47.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Ironic that Mads Mikkelsen found early international attention playing a famous Danish Nazi resistence fighter in FLAME AND CITRON/’08, yet is usually stuck playing villains, like this Nazi villain, in his English-language pics.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/08/flammen-og-citronen-flame-and-citron.html