Movie review: With the messy but poignant 'Dial of Destiny,' a franchise strains to keep up with the Joneses
The first time Harrison Ford appears in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny," you can't take your eyes off him, and not really in a good way. It's 1944, and Indy, captured while trying to plunder a Nazi stronghold, doesn't look a day over 46, an illusion that director James Mangold and his 80-year-old star have fostered with the latest and uncanniest in digital de-aging technology.
The effects are fairly astonishing, and all the more spookily disorienting for it (why does this Indy look so young but sound so gravelly?). If this is movie magic, it strikes me as magic of a decidedly dark vintage, and not just because of the dim haze that seems to cloud the finer details of cinematographer Phedon Papamichael's images.
Who or what exactly are we looking at here and why? As Indy hurls himself into a familiar round of death-defying high jinks, you may find yourself scanning the lightly scruffed but artificially smoothed contours of Ford's mug and wondering precisely that question.
