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Harrison Ford’s fifth and final film as the whip-wielding archaeologist moves at a fair crack but gets a little exhausting.
To stop the latest superpowered ancient gadget from falling into the hands of the latest batch of Nazis, the 80-year-old actor must squeeze into burial chambers, fight goons on top of a moving train, and wrestle killer eels.
This nostalgia trip is a lot more fun than 2008’s Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull but new director James Mangold’s zippy action scenes are missing that Spielberg sparkle.
It begins with a digitally de-aged Ford clashing with Mads Mikkelsen’s Nazi scientist Jurgen Voller in 1944.
After rescuing his English sidekick Basil Shaw (Toby Jones in the Denholm Elliot role), the pair discover half of the Dial of Destiny, a mysterious device that was split into two parts by its inventor Archimedes.
We cut to New York in 1969 to find our hero swigging bourbon in his underpants in a grotty New York flat. But a final treasure hunt beckons after a reunion with his annoying con artist goddaughter, Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge).
She wants to get her mitts on the artefact to raise some cash – and Mikkelsen’s German boffin (who is now a US rocket scientist) wants to use it to goose-step back into his past.
This sparks another round of globe-trotting, Nazi punching, and bickering with a mismatched partner.
A romance with the Fleabag star would have been unseemly but her duff wisecracks fail to channel the sparky generational comedy that Ford enjoyed with Sean Connery in The Last Crusade.
But at least Ford’s charisma is firing on all cylinders. Indy may complain of “crumbling vertebrae” but the veteran actor more or less carries this $300m blockbuster on his own.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Cert 12A, In cinemas now
