Last Gasps

"Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" and "Biosphere."

- ANTHONY LANE

New York, 1969. Asleep in a chair, Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is awoken not by an explosion, or by gunfire, but by a blast of "Magical Mystery Tour" from a nearby apartment. As he rises to remonstrate, he is shown naked to the waist, visibly worn, and stripped of both mystery and magic. The years have taken their usual withering revenge. Having spent his life hunting antiquities, Jones is at risk of becoming one himself. He pours a slug of booze into his coffee, and a document, glimpsed in passing, reveals that he is divorced from his wife, Marion (Karen Allen). Soon afterward, we see him teaching at Hunter College, where the students doze through his lecture. In honor of his years of service, he receives a clock, which he gives to a homeless man in the street. Time be damned.

These sorry scenes come from the fifth and almost certainly final chapter of a franchise that began in 1981. The new film is directed by James Mangold rather than by Steven Spielberg, and the title is not, as you might expect, "Indiana Jones and the Bathroom Break of Doom" or "Raiders of the Lost Slipper" but "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny." It's a movie of two minds, marked with hints of the hero's mortality-"Everything hurts," he says near the end and yet determined to convince itself, and us, that he is the exception to the rule of universal entropy. Once Jones gets going, his exploits acquire a desperate edge that wasn't there in the earlier movies. Maybe he fears that, were he to pause for breath, he might expire.