There is nothing good here. Nothing to like. Nothing of the real Indy and the movie KNOWS IT and HATES ITSELF. This film is like the plot equivalent of trying to commit suicide. In the opening sequence, Indiana Jones is on a Nazi train trying to recover artifacts and relics they have stolen in the waning days of World War Two, and trying to especially grab the Spear of Longinus, which would have been an unoriginal but fitting companion to the Grail & Ark, and discovers that all the relics are fake. Indy himself is portrayed as a relic and this film is fake. It knows this, deep down inside, and is screaming to be euthanized.

The film is obsessed with time, and there timepieces recurring throughout it, from the clock Indy receives at his retirement party, which he immediately hands off to a homeless person (the last thing he wants is more time), to the discovery of a wristwatch in the tomb of a 2000 year old person. And of course, it's about time travel. Isn't that a cool new thing? I can't wait until the next Star Wars episode when Rey uses time travel to stop the Empire.

Speaking of Rey, it's a Lucasfilm reproduction, so of course, we have to shoehorn in a skinny English brunette who always gets the last word and is clearly the character the filmmakers prefer over the heroes we came to see. At least up until now, they tended to be inoffensively pretty with fairly symmetrical features. But now they have Phoebe Waller Bridges. She was horrible in "Solo" when we didn't have to look at her, and only needed to hear her voice. Now she, and her nose that was intended for a different sized face, are showcased as Indy's long-estranged goddaughter, Helena Shaw.

Like her face, her character seems to be a mishmash of things that don't quite pull together. She seems to be a bit of a mercenary version of Indy, who only cares about money, except sometimes her godfather's or pet non-white boy, Teddy's well-being is her primary concern. Sometimes it seems like she's the flirty con-artist, but she doesn't demonstrate much in the way of cleverness. There are moments when she's the adorkable science nerd (think Rachel Weisz in The Mummy) but she's neither funny nor endearing. Maybe she's got a little bit of a protegee in her, except the movie makes it clear they haven't seen each other since she was in maybe middle-school. Not quite sure if that's what they have in England. Maybe tri-wizard tournament year? She isn't established to have any particular training or skills, aside from a familiarity with her father's work, but she can do any feat the plot wants her to accomplish, and is constantly being handed wins in arguments or judgment calls.

Disney appears to have learned their lesson a little, because Indy gets to show competence at time, grouchily shrugging off Helena's or Teddy's insistence that he's too old or doesn't know what he is doing, and then NOT being proven wrong, or having his hubris get punished. Rather than have him spend the whole film as a punching bag & straight man to Helena, the movie guts him by instead having everything happen through plot coincidences, rather than any real skill or derring-do by Indy or the villain, German Guy. I can't remember his name, he is played by Mads Mikkelsen, whom I really want to know how he got this reputation, because he's generally playing shit characters or acting in shit productions. Is "Hannibal" that good?

The film opens with an Indiana Jones mission in the 40s, as mentioned above, to try to remind us of the good movies, and it fails. Despite running into Nazis in two adventures before the war, working for the OSS during the war, according to "Crystal Skull", and spending a lot of time in Europe dealing with Nazi foes, Indy, despite his conversational fluency in Doric Greek and ability to read many ancient languages, could not be arsed to learn German at any point. The OSS had courses to teach you this sort of thing, because it makes so much sense in that context not even the government could miss it. So this means Indy is running around trying to bluff his way through an infiltration mission, generally ineptly, and succeeding only by luck. He also gets out of several physical dangers, because of random accidents eliminating a threat in wildly implausible ways. The CGI reconstruction of his younger face is acceptable, probably because the whole scene is set at night, but his voice sounds like he's in his 80s and he moves like an old man when he tries to run. The whole thing is a pointless pursuit of an object we know is not the focus of the movie, because of the title, while the actual McGuffin is found and explained by the bad guy, for the conveniently nearby and conscious good guy to overhear, relatively late in the scene. The buzz I heard was that this part was good, but it wasn't anything special. Maybe they were getting high on the nostalgia. As I said, Indy mostly blunders along not looking very competent and winning hand to hand fights with soldiers carrying guns, and being saved by pure coincidence and random things happening to his benefit, or the Nazis are just incompetent, possibly for comic relief?

Most of the movie is set in 1969, where everyone is making a big deal about the moon landing, while Indy seems sort of unimpressed. But the Nazi scientist who was more interested in the Dial of Destiny back during the war got Operation: Paperclipped, and apparently the government owes him a favor for his integral role in making the moon landing happen, so they are supporting his pursuit of said Dial, and Indy has a clue. The government agents and German Guy's personal henchmen utterly fail to catch a 70 year old man with the physical prowess of an 80 year old actor, and thus forearmed with knowledge that a caper is afoot, Indy sets off on his latest globe-trotting adventure, for which they forget the line on the map for all but one scene of traveling.

It turns out the dial was invented by Archimedes to predict time warp portals. The Nazi guy naturally wants to fix World War Two. Prior to coming to accept that that is possible, Indy nominally seems to want to clear his name, but how retrieving the Dial is going to accomplish that is unclear, or maybe he just wants to win, IDK. We get overlong and tedious chase sequences in foreign cities that feel like they go for way too long, and use inherently less exciting vehicles than the ones in prior films which inspired this one. There's a diving sequence where you can't see anyone's face, or having dialogue, which seems to be trying to make a funny with Indy's snake phobia by using eels instead. The obstacle around the ancient buried thing are forgettable, and the whole movie builds to a rushed climax, following a "fight" aboard a bomber plan that doesn't really have a purpose. Indy is required by the rules of the franchise. to be brought to the place to see them fulfil their plan, so it's not like there is any point to this fight. Then the payoff pays off absolutely nothing in the film, and we have a happy ending that is the logical conclusion of also nothing. The movie uses a lot of dialogue on Indy's age or physical condition or danger of death, but he still punches out bad guys and climbs rock walls and bears injuries exactly as well as the plot needs him to. Needless to say, no one has an arc, they have plot points resembling one, but characters are dragged through them BY the plot, not by any characterization. It wasn't even necessary, as he doesn't grow or change much in the first two films, as Lucas & Spielberg seemed to conceive this as a revival of the adventure serial concept, so they didn't even need to try, and the results are underwhelming. Certainly nothing that comes close to a moment like "Indiana. Let it go."

It's all just a dumb, badly-made, if not so aggressively awful as the last one, farce of an Indiana Jones movie. None of the badness or dumbness is even the fun kind of trainwreck or thing you can enjoy giving the MST3K treatment. You just feel bad for Harrison Ford/Indy (and momentarily, Jonathan Rhys-Davies) at having to go through this, and resentful at the other characters for existing.