Review of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) by Tubey — 01 Jul 2023

A movie that exists solely to emasculate a male movie icon and self-insert a Kathleen Kennedy approved female replacement, who is naturally the most unlikeable character imaginable, played by one of the most unappealing actresses working today in Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

Disney have decided to trade on nostalgia by dumping on everything nostalgic about the franchise. It's a bold strategy Cotton, let's see if it pays off for 'em... spoiler; it will not. This will haemorrhage money.

But well done Kathleen, you've murdered Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones. Good for you; I hope wasting money-printing franchises was worth fulfilling your misandrist dreams.

But you know, I'd forgive it 'somewhat' for this approach if it was at least entertaining, or was producing something new, taking chances or whatever. After all, just repeating what worked in the past is pointless because it's already been done, so yeah, a new approach is always worth praising if it's genuine and it works.

But it doesn't. It's just a boring movie with nothing to say, nothing innovative. It hits the familiar beats for 15 minutes on a train and then the rest of the movie is just an extremely dumb, badly written piece of crap. The protagonists are terrible - including Jones, because Ford has just checked out here - but the antagonists are awful too, no depth, cardboard cutouts with no threat to them. Nothing of note happens, it just trundles along for a few hours and ends, and nothing of value happens, the story beats don't land, it doesn't have ups and downs, it's just... nothing!

Can I say anything nice about it? Sure. First 15 mins, the de-ageing CGI for Ford is impressive enough, still uncanny valley-ish but much better than others that have tried the same approach.

And that's it. Even Williams' score is a bit 'meh' as it doesn't fit what's on the screen; but it's not his fault as he's have to compose a wet fart of a score to match up with what we're served here.

Grim. Sorry if this is a bit of an aimless rant, but it's just unbelievably poor. And my word, if news outlets start calling negative reviews 'review bombing' then... come on, you have to draw the line and just acknowledge when some thing SO bad just gets torn to shreds.

It's awful.