Harrison Ford still has it! BRIAN VINER discusses Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny
INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF THE DESTINY (12A, 154 mins)
Verdict: old hat
RUBY GILLMAN, TEEN CRACKING (PG, 90 mins)
Verdict: Vibrant animation
Quite a few years have passed since I stood next to Harrison Ford in a hotel lobby during the Cannes Film Festival, initially mistaking him for someone older and more fragile than a world-famous movie star.
He wore a sassy earring in a see-through effort to look more hip than prosthetic hip, and he also sported the slightly bewildered expression of a man who’d turned up on the wrong day to a Harrison Ford lookalike contest.
But seeing him in the lightly mottled flesh is not the same as seeing Ford on screen. In a few weeks he will be 81, but the camera continues to adore him. In his farewell jaunt as the world’s most famous and fearless fictional archaeologist, with the help of stuntmen and some deft touches from director James Mangold, he almost succeeds as an aging action hero.
Bravely, he also takes off his shirt, revealing the once tight, now saggy torso of a reasonably fit octogenarian who challenges us to look in the mirror for ourselves, those of us who remember going to the cinema in 1981 to see Raiders Of to see The Lost. Ark.
Yes, it’s been 42 years since we first met Indy, so hats off to battered fedora for its longevity. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Fate is the fifth and certainly the last film in the franchise, the first not directed by Steven Spielberg, but not the worst. That was 2008’s disappointing Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull.
In his farewell jaunt as the world’s most famous and fearless fictional archaeologist, Harrison Ford (pictured) almost does it like an old action hero
Overall, the new movie is also a disappointment, but that’s not Ford’s fault. He’s still a compelling screen actor, still able to command the screen with that slow, twisted smile and a minimum of fuss and flamboyance.
His sidekick in this movie is played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whose performance I thought was pretty good on first viewing, but now that I’ve seen it again I think she’s probably playing a misplaced part. She has more than enough charisma for the small screen, but somehow not enough for the big one.
The story begins in wartime, with Indy (a digitally-aged Ford) battling the Nazis for a powerful artifact, the titular Dial Of Destiny, created in the third century B.C. by none other than Archimedes. But the dial has been gently broken in half. Only when both pieces are put together will it do what the clever Archimedes intended, by propelling its owner through space and time.
We were then thrown back to 1969 ourselves, with Indy now a world-weary New York City professor, annoyed by his youthful neighbors playing The Beatles at high volume. But he’s about to embark on his own magical mystery tour after reuniting with his goddaughter, Helena (Waller-Bridge), whose father (Toby Jones) was a trusted academic colleague.
He only remembers Helena as a little girl, but now she’s all grown up and, behind her jolly hockey stick appearance, a bit of a villain. It’s never quite clear why the apple fell so far from the tree, but anyway, unlike her dear old father, she’s only interested in ancient artifacts for their monetary value, for which she has a sidekick of her own, a young Arab pickpocket (Ethann Isidore).
Her mischievousness makes it pretty clear from the start that she and her godfather have no intention of putting it together romantically, thank goodness, but they still make a generally unconvincing double act, not helped by his tense insistence on her “Wombat,” the name by which he knew her as a child.
Still, there’s all the set pieces you’d expect from an Indiana Jones movie to follow, as the goodies, semi-goodies, and downright bad guys (led by Mads Mikkelsen as a German rocket scientist) all criss-cross the Mediterranean in search of the missing half of the watch face, building to a truly ridiculous time travel finale.
There are some nicely choreographed chases and inevitably a dark underground chamber with boulders activated by secret levers that roll away and lead to even darker underground chambers, but at the world premiere in Cannes last month, I can’t say I’m anywhere near from the edge of my seat.
That glitzy display was preceded by the festival’s stylish tribute to Ford, a slick montage of his most famous film appearances that he watched with tears in his eyes, hand in hand with his wife Calista Flockhart. Really, this photo is the same kind of exercise: keeping pace with the Jones montage of Indy’s greatest hits. It’s tightly packaged, but never quite amounts to a top-notch adventure movie on its own.
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 it Ruby Gillman, Teenage Krakena DreamWorks animation that successfully weaves together a classic high school coming-of-age story with that of a family of benign sea monsters, or krakens, trying to impersonate ordinary landlubbers.
Ruby (voiced by Lana Condor) is a teenager who has been given strict orders by her mother (Toni Collette) to go nowhere near the ocean, not knowing that if she does she will turn into a huge kraken. Ruby understandably wonders why, given the obvious dangers of seawater, they moved to the town of Oceanside. “We had to stay moist,” her mother explains.
Unable to stay out of the salt water, Ruby ends up in hot water, but at least gains insight into the family’s predicament with the help of her ocean-dwelling grandmother (Jane Fonda). It’s crazy, but also loud, colorful and fun.
- A review of Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny first appeared on May 19.
Shiv’s Adventures with Alice and the White Rabbit
Australian actress Sarah Snook, as amazing as cunning, damaged Shiv in the TV drama Succession, gets a different kind of dark role in the new Netflix release Run Rabbit Run (15, 100 min, ★★★✩✩).
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 mother whose seven-year-old daughter, Mia (Lily LaTorre), begins to frighten her into appearing to believe she is the reincarnation of Sarah’s long-lost sister Alice – who disappeared, seven years old.
What also scares her is a white rabbit, who has mysteriously appeared on her 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 confused mother), and Snook’s usual excellence is matched every step of the way by young LaTorre, a real find.
But The Babadook (2014) set standards for Aussie horror that Daina Reid’s film never reaches – and I personally 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. Discovering a sneaky plan to sell nuclear technology to the Chinese, Kearney was targeted in many ways, culminating in a violent attack in her own home.
But did the attack happen, or did she fabricate it to discredit her enemies?
That is the essence of the story, told in a rather ponderous way, even though the leading role is the always magnetic Isabelle Huppert.
It was a strange decision to erase her character’s Irishness and still call her Kearney, but never mind: Huppert is fantastic.