Review: Indiana Jones - brilliant ending but awfully slow getting there...

A fabulously enjoyable and gloriously silly final half an hour is the eventual reward, but in truth it seems an awfully long time coming in this overlong film. Half an hour less would have been so much more. Early on, the car chases seem so endless you just wish someone somehow would catch someone, anyone. The action is relentless but the film’s forward momentum is minimal as a supremely convoluted premise is set up. The opening 20 minutes are OK. It’s the bit after that that slumps – the bit once we finally get to Indy as he’s looking now, the octogenarian version. Before that we get digital Indy.

It all opens with our whip-cracking adventurer battling his old foe, the Nazis on a hurtling train, packed with looted treasure, not least the remaining half of the Dial of Destiny of the title, a remarkable little device which Archimedes, no less, conjured up a couple of thousand years ago, allowing its possessor to jump around in space and time. You can see why the Nazis – in particular Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkeksen) – would want it, but for the moment Indy seems to triumph in a sequence in which Harrison Ford conquers time in a rather more sinister way. He is digitally de-aged to show him in his 40 s – and it’s rather effective, but also rather questionable. How long before dead actors are digitally brought back to life. Anyway, it romps along – until we flash forward to the space age and a Harrison Ford in a right old grump, more likely to draw his pension than a gun.

Indiana Jones, now knocking on a bit, is getting divorced, he’s grieving his son, he’s retiring from his job lecturing to a bunch of students who really couldn’t care less. He’s slumped, miserable, in his flat, dressed in just his boxers, the picture of dejection, his mojo completely AWOL. But it’s not long before he’s Indiana-ing again, and he’s a game old boy, for all he’s the wrong side of 80. And it’s not long the search for the two bits of Archimedes’ dial is back on the agenda. But goodness, this is where the film needs some serious editing. Clever-cleverness and chase after chase don’t do the film any favours.

The rewards come late in the day. It seems if you want to be a time-travelling Nazi, you really do need to be a little more accurate than Voller manages to be when he sets his trajectory. It’s all about the continental drift, it seems – and Voller doesn’t take it into account, dragging them all back to a place and a time no one expected to be. Cue the film’s best sequences and a few meetings that really do take a little bit of thinking about. Best not to say who Indiana ends up sharing the screen with, but the more you think about it, the more it makes your head hurt. Best just to go with it. It’s a wonderfully inventive sequence – and pretty much rescues the film.

There is another bonus, though, and that’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Indiana’s new sidekick, his super-spirited goddaughter. There’s fiery chemistry between her and her godfather. She’s a great character, and if this really is Harrison Ford’s last-ever outing as Indiana Jones, you really can imagine Waller-Bridge getting her own spin-off as a feistily adventurous chip off the old block. It would probably be worth watching.

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