Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

A pretty fantastic intro sequence introduces us to a CGI young Indy (Harrison Ford) doing his thing in 1944, Basil Shaw, a British archaeologist friend of Indy’s (house favourite Toby Jones), a Nazi scientist (Mads Mikkelsen), and the titular dial, or rather, one half of the dial. After an appropriate number of Nazis have been punched (poor Thomas Kretschmann), our hero waltzing from one bit of trouble to the next, we pop into the film’s main timeline in July/August 1969.

Indiana Jones is now a grumpy old man on the day of his retirement from a boring teaching job. Marion (Karen Allen) has left him in the course of grieving for their son (Shia LaBeouf is not appearing in this movie, thankfully, so his character can be more useful in death than he ever was in his fictional life) who died in Vietnam. The rest of his life really doesn’t look too sunny for our hero.

Then appears Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), the daughter of the long deceased Shaw and Indy’s goddaughter. Helena tries to talk Indy into one last jaunt with the hat and the whip to help her find the second half of the Dial. Well, actually, it turns out she’s trying to steal the first half of the Dial from our hero to sell it - on the black market, no less. Also on the trail of both halves of the Dial as well as Helena is our old Nazi scientist acquaintance, now going by the name of Dr Schmidt. After being the architect of the US space program, he’s now planning on conquering time – for Nazidom.

What follows is the somewhat expected race around the world, during which Helena and Indy slowly grow closer to one another, Helena gets back into contact with that moral core she must have read so much about, and Indy reacquaints himself with his very special kind of luck. A good time is had by all, well except Nazis and innocent bystanders, but the former really asked for it, and are usually directly responsible for the demise of the latter.

I’m not sure which James Mangold Indiana Jones movie a lot of other people seem to have seen, but the one I watched turned out to be rather wonderful. Mangold and the horde of writers credited really seem to get the proper tone and style for the series again (ironically unlike the people involved in the fourth Indy movie, who must have forgotten when they made that one), so action sequences may be big and partially digital, but are keeping well in the spirit of the serials and old pulp adventure, where the heroes mostly win out by sheer courage and luck than the sort of competence later decades started insisting on heroes showing. Which actually makes a quite a contrast to the way superheroes not called the (Legendary) Starlord or Ant-Man typically operate, and really makes it difficult to confuse this style of action adventure with a superhero movie (unlike you’re a mainstream critic, therefore quite dense or just too mid-brow to care). Though, to be honest, one late, rather, ahem, implausible plot development in third act is certainly only thinkable because superhero movies exist. It’s also one perfectly fitting to a film that is as focussed on legacies and shadows of the past as this one is, so I’m not going to complain, particularly when it gifts us with the wonderful villain line of “Yesterday belongs to us, Doctor Jones!”.

In between a series of rather wonderful set pieces in just the right spirit of adventure and derring-do, and the kind of quietly confident and elegant filmmaking Mangold gets up to in this sort of stylistically very mainstream production, there are also a series of small and big scenes not just meant to propel our heroes (such as they are) from one place to the next, but also to comment on and mirror some of the elements of the older movies in the series. Waller-Bridge’s may at first look like a more modern by simply being more cynical version of Indy, but later developments suggest she’s just more honest about the worst parts of her character to herself than Indy is, and – in the sort of irony this particular film genuinely seems to enjoy – also less honest about the best parts of it, which makes for a nice reversal. Indy, for his part, is allowed to express all the frustrations and horrors of growing old and lonely, but, the film argues, that’s because he’s going out of his way to push away the people he means a lot to, and underplaying some of what makes him more than a graverobber to himself as much as Helena underplays her own better nature.

Which sets up one of the most traditional happy endings I’ve seen in quite some time. For once, the old hero is actually allowed to retire to the peaceful, happy life he deserves instead of dying heroically so that the younger generation must go on without him. to probably repeat that cycle again. That’s fitting to the genre Indy is working in as well, of course, because serials were eventually resolved through happy ends, instead of the old guard dying with their dreams burning down around them (hi, Star Wars).

I, for one, like to see a bit of hope in my movies from time to time.

In short: Identity (2003)

Ten people (among them characters played by John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Ray Liotta, John Hawkes and Clea DuVall) find themselves stranded in a small Nevada motel during a rainstorm that makes the roads leading in and out impassable. Which would be trouble enough, but there’s also the fact that one of them is a killer who begins murdering their way through the group, leaving behind a numbered motel key with each victim counting down from ten..

There are increasing hints that something more and stranger is going on than a less cosy update of the classic murder mystery formula.

That something turns out to be at once perfectly ridiculous and perfectly awesome, so much so, I don’t really feel the need to spoil James Mangold’s movie to anyone who hasn’t seen it after twenty years. So let’s just say the film has some rather peculiar ideas about how certain mental illnesses and their treatment work, but these are the kind of peculiar ideas that make for a fine, twist-heavy thriller.

Michael Cooney’s script is wonderful, pacing out small reveals and clues in perfect rhythm while playing around with the kind of traditional murder mystery structure that typically becomes just that decisive bit more interesting when a film begins having a bit of fun with its clichés and its normal structure. The final reveal makes it possible that not everything that’s going on needs to make a hundred percent real world sense, which does add further opportunities for structural and formal playfulness.

Mangold’s direction is slick and state of the art of 2003, but unlike other contemporary directors working on this technical level at the time (see the insufferable films of Tony Scott), he is able to use the gloss to create a specific and particular mood – in this case, a glossy yet also miserable and dark all-pervading wetness, the feel of safety always on the brink of breaking down, which feeds excellently into the mood and tone of what’s going on on the surface, as well as below.

Identity is a fine piece of work all around, technically accomplished, clever if a bit silly, tense and fun, with a great cast, and not a single boring moment in it.

Three Films Make A Post: Aliens Invade! Mankind fights back!

The Wolverine (2013): After the apocalypse of crap that was the first Wolverine movie, I didn't expect anything at all from James Mangold's sequel, so it was a rather pleasant surprise to find it to be a highly entertaining mix of action movie tropes, good-natured Japan clichés, appropriate comic book silliness, and even half-way poignant moments. Add to these points the production's decision to cast the Japanese characters with actual Japanese actors instead of any Asian looking guy or girl they could grab from the street, and the (for contemporary blockbuster cinema) surprising amount of time The Wolverine has for its female characters. The film has reached the point where Tao Okamoto and Rila Fukushima are actual female leads again, and not just the girls on screen to look pretty and motivate the lone hero.

And isn't it a fine thing too that the film's usually very lone hero actually needs a lot of help to get by, which the film treats as a strength and not as a weakness?

The World's End (2013): I think I've repeatedly gone on record as a big admirer of Edgar Wright, so it won't come as much of a surprise to anyone that I really, really like the last film in the thematic trilogy that started with Shaun of the Dead. Having said that, I also think it’s fortunate the film at hand is the final film in the thematic trilogy because it's hard not to see that things begin repeating themselves now, and it's probably good Wright is doing something probably quite different next with Ant-Man (as he did, to be fair, with Scott Pilgrim, a film many sad people seem to hate for reasons inexplicable to me). At this point, The World's End repeats Wright's favourite themes and character types on a still highly entertaining and clever level. It's also at its core probably Wright's saddest movie, though this is the kind of film that really isn't out to make its audience sad; the sadness is just there if you're of the temperament to see it.

Children of the Night (1991): Tony Randel's vampire horror comedy is a bit of a strange egg. Tonally, it rather undecidedly jumps from broad small town satire to gore to really stupid comedy to slightly less stupid comedy to grotesque semi body horror to dark fairy-tale and back again, putting quite a few moments of actual magic in between triteness, annoying stupidity and stupid fun. The permanent tonal shifts make it impossible to a) get a very good grip on the movie as a whole and b) to ever be as much drawn into the film's very weird world as one would wish. Still, there's as much to like as to hate in here, and this is the sort of small town horror movie whose true hero isn't one of its theoretical leads (Peter DeLuise and Ami Dolenz), nor Karen Black chewing scenery, but Garrett Morris as said small town's black town drunk. Which is to say, a film worth fighting through the unfunny moments for the actual surprises it contains.

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