Indiana Jones & The Dial Of Destiny Review: 6 Ups & 4 Downs

Downs...

4. It's WAY Too Long

One of the many great things about even the worst of the Indiana Jones movies is their relentless, snappy pacing, with the first four movies clocking in at around two hours a-piece, the longest being the 128-minute The Last Crusade.

But following the trend of contemporary blockbusters having no editorial restraint whatsoever, The Dial of Destiny is 154 minutes long and absolutely fails to justify that expanded runtime.

From its distended opening prologue sequence onward, this is a sluggishly paced adventure that dawdles rather lackadaisically from one globetrotting set-piece to the next.

It's painfully clear that there's just way too many subplots and characters for a breezy adventure film template to support.

This becomes especially egregious mid-film when Indy (Harrison Ford) and his goddaughter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) spend a solid 20 minutes hanging out with Indy's old diver pal Renaldo (a thoroughly wasted Antonio Banderas).

The inclusion of a Short Round-esque child sidekick, Teddy (Ethann Isidore), also adds virtually nothing to the story and ends up feeling like narrative dead weight - especially as we aren't ever really compelled to care about him when he's placed in peril.

The middle of the movie gets dangerously close to being genuinely boring at times, and it's therefore obvious that this thing needed another pass or two in the edit bay - if not the scripting process - before hitting screens.