Disney
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday — in a scene that brought Harrison Ford to tears — and the early reviews out of France are… not great.
After 16 reviews (at the time of this writing), Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny currently has a 44% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, which is the lowest in the five-film franchise so far — lower than even the generally-reviled 2008 entry Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Many of the reviews, including this one from Variety, seem to indicate that the film is a futile exercise in nostalgia.
“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a dutifully eager but ultimately rather joyless piece of nostalgic hokum,” Variety writes.
“The de-aging and other CGI manipulations of Ford’s body only serve to demonstrate that Dial of Destiny just wants to turn back the clock instead of doing anything new,” says The Daily Beast.
“The jokes, the zest, and the exuberance just aren’t there, so instead of a joyous send-off for our beloved hero, we get a depressing reminder of how much livelier his past adventures were,” the BBC summarized in their review.
In addition to the legendary Harrison Ford portraying Indiana Jones for the final time, Dial of Destiny stars Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen, Boyd Holbrook, Antonio Banderas, Thomas Kretschmann, and Toby Jones.
Here is the official synopsis for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, via Disney:
Daredevil archaeologist Indiana Jones races against time to retrieve a legendary dial that can change the course of history. Accompanied by his goddaughter, he soon finds himself squaring off against Jürgen Voller, a former Nazi who works for NASA.
If Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is truly another misfire from Lucasfilm then it might be time for Disney to find new leadership for the studio, which hasn’t been able to get a Star Wars film off the ground since 2019’s disastrous The Rise of Skywalker.