2023 Has Become The Year Of Harrison Ford Actually Giving A Crap Again

This post contains spoilers for "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny."

When "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" hit theaters on May 24, 1989, I was certain this third chapter would mark the end of the series. Ford was 46 years old, the same age as my dad, who couldn't operate a push mower without risking a severe back injury. The rugged archaeologist was already feeling long in the tooth in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," famously confiding in Karen Allen's Marion Ravenwood that "It's not the age, honey, it's the mileage." We loved Indiana Jones because he wasn't an indestructible action hero like Roger Moore's James Bond. He bled. He got busted up. So when he rode off into the sunset alongside Sean Connery, John Rhys-Davies and Denholm Elliott at the conclusion of "Last Crusade," it felt final. It had to be.

But when Ford and Steven Spielberg mothballed Indy, the former struggled to transition out of his action hero persona. He did well sporting a Caesar cut as a lawyer charged with murdering his mistress in Alan J. Pakula's "Presumed Innocent," but, generally, whenever he made a movie that didn't require him to rack up more mileage on that toned, but far-from-buff working man's body, moviegoers kept their distance. "Regarding Henry," "Sabrina" and "Random Hearts" were supposed to broaden his appeal and place him in Oscar contention, but they were strangely hollow entertainments, primarily due to Ford's tentativeness playing, respectively, a severely brain-damaged attorney, a romantically inept businessman and a cop struggling to come to grips with his deceased wife's infidelity.

You can see Ford, one of our most dependably instinctive stars, thinking his way through these portrayals. When the movies underperformed or flat-out bombed commercially, he doubled-back to actioners like "The Fugitive," "Air Force One" and his two Jack Ryan movies. He could still hit these notes, but the irritable nuance he'd brought to his 1980s collaborations with Peter Weir, "Witness" and "The Mosquito Coast," had vanished.

"Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" is far from a perfect movie, but Ford's fearless flaunting from the outset of his creased octogenarian flesh (as The Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour" blares in the background) makes us feel every broken bone and bullet wound he's sustained over his adventuring career. Indy looks whipped. He's also lost his classroom sex appeal, as evidenced by his students struggling to stay awake during his lecture on Archimedes (whose mathematical genius gives the film its narrative engine).

Ford deadpans Indy's dissatisfaction with reaching the end of the line so ingloriously, and only brightens when he runs across old friends like Salah (Rhys-Davies) and the newly introduced Greek diver Renaldo (Antonio Banderas).

As for Waller-Bridge's Helena Shaw, the daughter of his deceased colleague Basil Shaw, he's at once disgusted by her mercenary practice of archeology and begrudgingly impressed by her pluck. It's a joy to see Ford playing Indy as a befuddled father figure; he's still got a good deal of bluster, but he can't quite keep pace with her chicanery. That his goddaughter's got more than a little Belloq in her clearly stings the old man.

But when they fall into conversation on Renaldo's boat over the potential applications of Archimedes' dial, we learn why Indy's become a creaky, whiskey-belting sad sack. If the device does what it's purported to do, Indy could travel back in time and tell his son Mutt (Shia LeBeouf) not to enlist in Vietnam. Mutt felt like an afterthought in "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," so it's a shock that his off-screen death hits with such poignancy. This is all Ford's doing. The rascally Indy, the inveterate adventurer, died with Mutt and the subsequent break-up of his marriage to Marion. That he has to chase down another relic to save the world in his dotage is only a curse.