Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny2023

56/100 The most I can say for this is that it's not bad. At least the previous movie had some of the charm I associate with the early twenty-first century and was fun throughout, rather than being almost as charmless as it is boring like this movie. I guess I should start with something I like to show I don't hate this thing. The opening is actually pretty good for what it's worth, and serves as a fun little action scene. The de-aging effects also are surprisingly good here and Harrison Ford's still got it as the rogueish archaeologist. I was surprised by the fact that the characters themselves are handled very well in this movie. I mentioned that Harrison Ford is as good as ever, in both emotional scenes as well as action. I also liked Phoebe Waller-Bridge as a fun sidekick for Indy to bounce off of with her more morally neutral personality. Mads Mikkelsen is of course great, and I actually liked his character more than the villains of Last Crusade and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. He is a great, calculating villain with the interesting motive of being a Nazi who wants to kill Hitler to prevent the mistakes that made the Nazis lose the war. For what it's worth, I also liked Sallah and Marion's cameos. However, that's about all the praise I can give this movie, and it has many issues weighing it down. For one, while I wasn't a huge fan of Mutt, fridging him offscreen just to explain why Indy and Marion divorced is just lazy. He could've been in the movie instead of the even more annoying kid character we got, who feels like a worse Short Round. There's also the fact the movie drops off hard after the first act. The second act is really boring, and the third act overcorrects by going insane and inserting time travel, which somehow fits less than the interdimensional aliens from last movie. The worst part is that it doesn't even have the guts to go fully insane, dropping abruptly back into a pedestrian finale which feels overly rushed and rewritten. Mads Mikkelsen dies in the most pedestrian way ever; his plane crashes and that's it. We then meet Archimedes and the writers realize they don't have the time to make this impactful, instead rushing through the mediocre finale. I was looking forward to John Williams' score here, and maybe if it was good it could've saved the movie, but instead it's a rare miss for him, with the only track I liked being the iconic theme, which seems underutilized here given the rest of the soundtrack being what it is. You know a movie's not good when even John Williams sounds like he's phoning it in. This movie isn't bad at all, but it accomplishes something I thought impossible: it makes Indiana Jones, one of cinema's most fun characters, boring. There's enough substance here that I can see why someone might like it, but there's also enough trash that I can't say it's anything above mediocre.