Indiana Jones and the script by ChatGPT

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the fifth and final film in the franchise so it’s Harrison Ford’s last go at cracking the bullwhip as either the world’s greatest archaeologist or the world’s greatest plunderer, depending on where you are coming from.

Ford is now eighty but they still make him appear to climb rock faces, jump between buildings, punch underwater eels in the face and gallop a horse through the New York subway — and there is no doubt about it: he could pluck the still-beating heart from your chest if he was of a mind, so steer clear and never grab the stool next to him in Pret a Manger. (I wonder if Ford ever beseeched on behalf of his character: “Can’t he just do Wordle and watch Homes Under the Hammer for a morning?” Perhaps if he agreed to punch three more eels in the face first and race a tuk-tuk through the labyrinthine back streets of Tangiers, they’d think about it.)

This is the first of the films not directed by Spielberg — James Mangold is at the helm — and I was hoping it would have something to say about aging and mortality or even send itself up in some clever way, but no such luck. It opens with a twenty-minute prologue set in Germany in 1944 as the Third Reich is crumbling and Jones — a “de-aged” Ford — is set on plundering treasure the Nazis have already plundered. (Two wrongs don’t make a right, fella.) The treasure is the Dial of Destiny, which was created by Archimedes and is capable of playing with space and time. Jones and a fellow archaeologist, Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), wrest the object from a nasty Nazi Commander (Mads Mikkelsen), who wrests it back… There is a lot of wresting via car chases, a motorbike chase, running along the roof of a moving train (tunnel!) and so on. Evil Nazis; set action pieces. It’s business as usual, in other words.

Spool forward to 1969 and Jones is living in New York and giving a university lecture on the day of his retirement. (He got tenure? Did anyone check to see if he’d published a single article in any peer-reviewed journal?) It turns out that Basil was his greatest friend and he is godfather to his daughter, Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge). We first met Indiana Jones in 1981 (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and in all this time he has never mentioned a friend and goddaughter. He’s a dark horse, I’ll give him that. And Helena now turns up at his lecture. She wants to retrieve the Dial of Destiny but then, it quickly transpires, so does that nasty Nazi commander. The wresting is now a three-way affair via yet more set-pieces and exotic locales (Greece, Italy, Tangiers), but with scant tension or excitement. As I wrote in my notes, it’s purely “peril, peril, peril, narrow escape, phew.”

I can, in fact, see why they looked at Waller-Bridge (and Fleabag and Killing Eve) and thought: we want some of those modern feminist smarts that are all the rage, but rather than bend to her will, this bends her to it. Her character does start as roguish but she’s quickly transformed into a bland action girl who adds little value. Meanwhile, the John Williams score is used sparingly, which is disappointing, and an alternative title that would have done just as well could have been Indiana Jones and the Script by ChatGPT. Here’s a typical line: “It’s not what you believe, it’s how hard you believe it.”

It feels like a missed opportunity and now there will never be another one. Still, I wish Indy a happy retirement and hope he’s not asked to prove the provenance or legal ownership of any of the items he’s procured down the years.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.