‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’: Harrison Ford and Fool’s Gold

I saw “Raiders of the Lost Ark” on my 15th birthday and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” on my 57th. I’d love to report that the fifth chapter made me feel like a high-school freshman again, but unfortunately this series has gone the way of my aching knees.

Steven Spielberg has passed the baton to a new director, James Mangold, who did excellent work with “Logan” and “Ford v Ferrari” but now looks borderline incompetent when taking over from the maestro. Mr. Mangold and his co-writers—“Ford v Ferrari” brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, plus David Koepp (“Jurassic Park”)—may be top men, but they have simply misunderstood the assignment. Harrison Ford’s Indy is not a superhero. He’s supposed to be the ultimate analog action hero—gritty, tough, but very human. Everything he does must be carefully staged to look as though a man with no special abilities could achieve it. “Dial of Destiny”’ is, if anything, even more breathless and filled with stunts than “Raiders,” but everyone’s feats look like insipid fakery. Who, other than a Looney Tunes character, would light a stick of dynamite in hopes of being just a few yards away when it explodes? Why does Indy’s old pal Sallah ( John Rhys-Davies ) appear out of nowhere at just the right instant to deliver a knockout punch to an innocent fellow?

Most puzzling of all, why does a budding archaeologist—a grad student in one of Dr. Jones’s classes named Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) who turns out to be his goddaughter—have a set of action-hero skills that would astonish James Bond? The writers have over-learned a lesson from the ’80s (don’t have the lead woman be a shrieking ninny like Kate Capshaw in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” amusing as Ms. Capshaw was) and given Helena so much derring-do that she is a caricature. Ms. Waller-Bridge, who created and starred in a sitcom, “Fleabag,” in which her character is meant to be wickedly funny, exudes smugness. She practically dares the audience not to like her, and many will accept the challenge. Her style is so completely at odds with Mr. Ford’s that pairing these chalk-and-cheese performers is a disaster akin to matching Will Smith and Kevin Kline in “Wild Wild West” or Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen in “Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones.”

What’s the Dial of Destiny? It’s a time-travel gizmo made by Archimedes that was one of the mystical objects sought by Hitler. In a 1944 prologue, Indy and an academic friend, Basil Shaw ( Toby Jones ), fight an SS officer ( Mads Mikkelsen ) for the device, half of which winds up at the bottom of a river in Europe. This opening sequence makes good use of digital de-aging technology for both Mr. Ford and Mr. Mikkelsen (although it looks murky, perhaps to conceal the brush strokes), and serves as a vague approximation of a rousing Indiana Jones set piece. Things get increasingly ludicrous, though, after we jump ahead to 1969. In these later sequences Mr. Ford looks every week of his actual age yet Indy continues to cavort as though in his prime, riding a horse in a New York subway tunnel in one of many ideas that come across as silly rather than exciting. Later he takes a bullet to the upper body without so much as requesting aspirin. His complaints about crumbling vertebrae while climbing a rock are unconvincing.

This older Indy is reeling from a split with his wife, Marion ( Karen Allen of “Raiders”), who left him when their son was killed in Vietnam. But Helena, Basil’s daughter, whom Indy has not seen since she was a kid, turns up with more information about the dial left by her late father and a plan to retrieve it with Indy’s help. Meanwhile, Mikkelsen’s ex-Nazi, Dr. Voller, is working in the U.S. space program and still lusts after the dial, while a gang of CIA spies turns up in a tangled subplot.

“Dial of Destiny” isn’t quite as face-meltingly bad as “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” but that 2008 monstrosity may be the cinematic crime of this century. Mostly “Indy 5” serves as a reminder of the incomparable brilliance of Mr. Spielberg on “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” which today might be the single most beloved film of the 1980s. The precise choreography of image and editing in the action scenes made every illusion seem real. Mr. Mangold’s work, by contrast, looks choppy, sloppy and chaotic, and the script focuses not so much on telling a story as on lashing together these dismal set pieces. From failing to make the geriatric Indy look vulnerable to the preposterous time-travel climax, which seems like a missing chapter from Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, Part I” (released the same day as “Raiders”), “Dial of Destiny” was simply a mistake.