I don’t know if it’s possible to tell this story without spoilers, but I’ll do my best.
Have you ever seen a 2 1/2 hour movie that you wanted to see so badly that it could never have lived up to your expectations, but that was a huge disappointment until about the last 15 minutes?
That’s what happened to me when I finally made it through “Indiana Jones and Dial of Destiny” this afternoon.
“Dial of Destiny,” which we will call “IJ5” for the rest of this piece, should never have been made. The first three movies in the series came out in the 1980s, with Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones from age 38-46 in two wonderful lovies and one very good one.
That was it until 19 years later there was a fourth film that was pretty good until it was almost ruined by a ridiculous climax that contracted the main premise of the story.
Oh, well. Still fun to watch.
But Ford was 65 then, a little long in the tooth to play an action hero. It was anything but surprising that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas shut it down after “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”
Of course no one ever says never in Hollywood with the possible exceptions of “Heaven’s Gate 2” or “Waterworld 2: This Time it’s Personal.” That’s why a fifth Indy movie with an 80-year-old Harrison Ford may have been inevitable.
So were other choise that stemmed from Ford’s age.
First and foremost, I’m not sure I ever saw a movie in which darkness wasn’t part of the plot that was so dark. The 18-minute set piece at the beginning — overly long — was shot at night in a rainstorn on a poorly-lit train.
Why? My guess is that making it as dark as possible made it easier to disguise the fact that the man performing Indy’s stunts was not an 80-year old Harrison Ford, but a younger stuntman.
The same is true later in sequences on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea and deep inside caves in Sicily.
I suppose the best way to describe how I felt about it is that I started watching the movie on Tuesday and got through about an hour of it It was sort of boring to me, so I figured I would get back to it the next day.
It was three days till I got back to it, and was very disappointed to see it was just one chase after another.
I was ready to write it off as a bad job — until the last 15 minutes.
Here’s where you have to take my word for it, because almost anything I say about the story would be a spoiler and I don’t want to do that.
I’ll just say that rating the movie on a five-star scale from zero to five, until the last 15 minutes, the best I could give it was an overly general two stars.
The ending was good, though. Good enough to make it three or maybe even three and a half stars.
A decent way to end a great series.