The recent release of the new Indiana Jones video game made me want to see what the 5th film was like, especially James Mangold sometimes manages to make decent films and what's more, like everyone else, I really like Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
First observation, the film may take place in 1969, but Mangold still managed to make the Nazis the big bad guys of the story. Why not ? But did we really have to experience a horrible flashback in the introductory scene with a digitally rejuvenated Harrison Ford? It's absolutely disgusting. We're right in the uncanny valley and it's absolutely disturbing. This is the kind of sequence that we will watch again in 10 years and say to ourselves: oh my god, what an abomination! Plus it's not just 5 minutes, the intro is super long and ultimately you just wait for it to end (a bit like the whole film).
There is a real problem with the rhythm in the film, everything is too long, the action sequences are hardly exciting and struggle to shake us out of our torpor. In fact the film goes at 100 miles an hour, something is always happening, but it almost never takes the time to reflect on a situation, there is always a twist, it's tiring and each twist being 5x bigger than the previous one, in the end, as unbelievable as an Indiana Jones may be at the start, well we just don't believe in it at all. It's too much.
And yet once in 1969 with Harrison Ford at his current age, the film begins with an interesting sequence: he is old. Seeing this half-naked body of an 80-year-old guy getting dressed to go tell his neighbor to turn off the music is something. Indiana Jones has become a reaction that young people annoy. He is no longer respected and is sent into retirement. His students are pissing each other off… There was something to explore there.
But very quickly boom badaoum, action, bang bang, horse, boom, bang bang and it won't stop until the end of the film. While frankly, the question of how a hero lives deprived of his physical abilities, disconnected from the society in which he lives, well it was perfect. There we see an old bedridden man who had difficulty putting on his t-shirt 20 minutes earlier fighting against guys who are 50 years younger than him as if nothing had happened. Suddenly he becomes the hero he always was and much more. We will still have one or two sentences about: alalah my back, but that's it, it doesn't impact anything he is capable of doing. What is the project?
It's as if the screenwriters had said to themselves: oh yes, he's still old, before saying: yeah, we're going to make an Indiana Jones as if we didn't take it into account. There was something to be done on the face of this hero. I want to know how a guy like that adapts to the modern world.
The worst part of all this is that we give him back his leathers, his hat and his whip and obviously he is not in the jungle in the 30s or 40s but in the world of 1969 and that denotes, but it doesn't It's not even exploited. This guy, his ways of doing things, etc., are ridiculous at the dawn of the 70s and the film does nothing about it.
In fact the project itself makes no sense…
We had to make the Castafiore jewelry equivalent to Indiana Jones or whatever, but not that. Especially in terms of adventure it's disappointing, they only go around the Mediterranean, it lacks exoticism. You had to push the cap all the way. Indiana Jones having an adventure in his living room.
I don't even want to talk too much about the fantastic dimension of the film which seems a bit pointless to me. It's all unexploited, hastily done… and ugly…
I also have difficulty understanding why we get rid of Indiana Jones' son to burden him with a goddaughter… so the choice of Phoebe Waller-Bridge is not bad, because the actress is good, ambivalent and even physically her presence is refreshing because she does not completely correspond to the archetype of blockbuster heroine. We see a slightly different face.
But his character is a bit rubbish, we all know his trajectory from the start, there's no doubt. It's not very interesting.
In fact the film had everything in hand and sabotaged itself by not daring to follow through with the beginning of the ideas they had.
In short, it sucks.
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