Starring Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen

Directed by James Mangold

Disney/Paramount, out now

Twenty-five years after a dangerous wartime mission brings him in contact with a mysterious artefact, Indiana Jones is caught up in a hunt that could change the course of history…

There’s a great deal to enjoy about this fifth Indiana Jones movie – the sixth time Harrison Ford has played the role officially (as American fans can check out, he also makes a guest appearance in one of the later Young Indiana Jones TV movies) – and while the honest answer to the question, Did we need another Indy adventure? has to be no, it’s an enjoyable 150 minutes, that might have benefitted from some judicious pruning but which acts as a much better capstone to the series than its immediate predecessor.

Having very recently watched the revised version of Godfather III, which treats that movie very much as a coda to Michael Corleone’s life, this feels very similar. Towards the end of this film, a key character tells Indy that they’ve heard that he’s back, and that is the case by that point; however, once we’re past what in a Bond movie would be the pre-credits, we find Indy the antithesis of where we first met him. His students don’t care, and clearly neither does he – he’s not even clocked that it’s his retirement day. Cue the arrival of his goddaughter, Helena, at which point slowly but surely the old muscles (in all senses) start to respond to stimuli – and before long we’re in something of a madcap race around the world and the years fall away, without the magic of the methods used for the 1944 sequence. (For the record, bar the odd moment, that was surprisingly successful – but as has been noted, Ford can’t help moving physically differently, and a bit more work on his voice would have helped sell the illusion further.)

James Mangold brings his own directorial choices to the table – you sense occasionally that it could all have been edited a little tighter to match the previous movies – and there’s a clever use of some of the series’ tropes (you’ll spot a couple of things missing… but then they appear just when needed). The chases are fun – and as with Temple of Doom, notably, watching with subtitles eventually will reveal the dialogue that gets lost in the mix – and while the final half hour or so is bound to divide opinion, it’s an Indiana Jones film: go with the flow!

Wisely, there’s not an attempt to overly disguise Ford’s age (Indy is 70 in this rather than Ford’s own eight-decades or so), with Phoebe Waller-Bridge also playing younger. She’s a very different kind of sidekick than we get in the earlier movies, and all the better for it – we get the usual nods to the past (photos of Connery and Karen Allen) as well as a glorified cameo by John Rhys-Davies, and there’s another “cute kid”, this time attached to Waller-Bridge’s Helena. It’s never really felt like villains are the strongest aspect of this franchise and Mikkelsen does what he can with some quite thin material, as does Boyd Holbrook.

Verdict: Is it fun? Yes, it is. There’s a certain element of Greatest Hits to it (one cut I’d’ve made is a direct repeat of a gag from Temple – no, not that one) but when Ford gives that grin, John Williams’ score swells and the bad guys are all pointing their guns at Indy and Helena… it’s escapist entertainment that works. 8/10

Paul Simpson