Harrison Ford says goodbye to another one of his iconic characters in front of James Mangold’s camera.
Hollywood seems to have toned down on the “legacy” films, those last acts of cult franchises featuring the farewell of their graying stars (the latest Star Wars trilogy, Matrix Resurrections…) or even those who are already deceased (the Harold Ramis hologram in Ghostbusters: Afterlife). It may just be a momentary break, but in 2023, we see very few of these films, where even the new Indiana Jones, which promised to be a caricature of the genre, unexpectedly deviates from the conventional obsessions about aging and farewells to the stage.
First and foremost, Harrison Ford has already symbolically bid farewell in Star Wars: Episode VII. Repeating the theme with his “other” iconic character would feel like a repetition or a lazy ready-to-shoot film. But most importantly, James Mangold, who directs this fifth installment of the archaeologist’s adventures, has the elegance to take the assignment seriously enough to refuse the twilight formatting.
Indy is approaching eighty years old, and the film doesn’t pretend otherwise (tender shots of the quiet anonymity of retirement and compression stockings drying on the balcony, obligatory comic lines in action scenes like “too old for this shit”). But Mangold is less interested in transforming the character than in transforming the form. Hence, the sublimation of adventure cinema, in search of a fusion point in several breathtaking chase sequences, which somewhat detach themselves from the narrative and suspend the film in an aesthetic stasis.
A horse chase in a San Francisco drowned in the confetti of a military parade, a nocturnal ballet of motorcycles and planes on a tarmac covered in fat, torrential rain, a cat-and-mouse game on a Nazi train pursued by Allied bombers (echoing the opening sequence of The Last Crusade): the film is resplendent, gargantuan on paper, but without ever producing an overload effect.
What lies ahead for Harrison Ford?
Occasionally, we lose interest in the plot, faced with an approach that turns away from the destinies of men to abandon itself to the destiny of images. And so, it seems quite coherent that Mangold also abandons the theme of transmission. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, a young British protégée who could have been an avatar of Daisy Ridley from Star Wars, is an orphaned ward who does not seek a symbolic father. Indy is left without descendants, in an adventure that holds out the promise of detachment from the race of time (the artifact at the center of the plot and the title is an ancient clock) and invites him to join mythology without being accountable to the present (let’s be vague to avoid spoilers).
However, there is still a special emotion towards Harrison Ford, and one wonders what future remains for him now that he has rung the death knell for his three iconic characters (Indy, Han Solo, Rick Deckard) before receiving an honorary Palme d’Or. Retirement is not to his liking, though: the tireless octogenarian recently signed on for two Marvel films.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny by James Mangold, in theaters on June 28.
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