Adjust your expectations, if necessary.

With Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, director James Mangold is playing with what amounts to Hollywood royalty. It is not unfair to describe the original Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) as one of the greatest American films of all time. It was a knowing and clever pastiche of 1930s Hollywood adventure serials, matched with top-of-his-game action direction by Steven Spielberg, state-of-the-art production courtesy of George Lucas, and an immediately iconic lead performance from Harrison Ford. Ford may have already been a household name as Star Wars‘ Han Solo, but as Indiana Jones he became a screen legend. The mixture of old school heroism and early 1980s cynicism was a perfect combination, and he perfectly embodied the mixture. Two sequels in 1984 and 1989 maintained the affections of a mass audience, although the late appearance of a third – 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of a Crystal Skull – was perhaps not met with the satisfaction viewers were expecting to feel.

Here we are, another 15 years later, with a fifth adventure for the beloved archaeologist. Harrison Ford is 80 years old. Steven Spielberg has stepped aside, not wanting to spend another two years putting together an adventure film. George Lucas retired some years ago after selling Lucasfilm to Disney. In all honesty it seems improbable that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny exists at all. It is honestly open to question if it even should.

Following a prologue in 1945, Dial of Destiny picks up in 1969 New York: Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins have returned to Earth from their moon landing, the city is celebrating in the streets, and Indiana Jones (Ford) is preparing at last to retire. An encounter with goddaughter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) throws him into one final adventure, racing against a Nazi scientist (Mad Mikkelsen) to complete the fabled Archimedes Dial.

Indiana Jones is clearly a role Harrison Ford has held close to his heart. Unlike his abrasive dismissals of his Star Wars work, Ford has openly embraced being Jones. The care he takes in performing the role is palpable, and it is no surprise that he does so superbly here. The character is perfectly pitched. It is the same Dr Jones, now beaten-down by age, irrelevance, and personal circumstance. His leap into an international adventure, punching Nazis and running for his life from ruin to ruin, feels believable. It is well-pitched between that sense of ‘same old Indy’ and an elderly version of the same. It does seem extremely likely that this will be Ford’s final turn in the role, and he has excelled each and every team.

As for the film around him, it is a little more difficult to say. When Dial of Destiny works, it does so admirably. When the dialogue sparks, it shines. Thanks to Phedon Papamichael it has a visual crispness that, while not approaching the iconic look of Douglas Slocombe (cinematographer of the original Raiders of the Lost Ark), does look an awful lot better than Janusz Kaminski’s milky patina in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

To repeat: that is when the film works. When it doesn’t, the result are much more middling and disappointing. The film’s biggest flaw is that it is too long and drawn out. At 154 minutes, Dial of Destiny outlasts Raiders by more than half an hour – and the audience is going to feel every second of it. The extra time is never put to good use. Whenever events feel as if they’re building in energy, the film grinds to a halt for several minutes. Action scenes never seem properly realised or fulfilled, and new characters are introduced with a paucity of depth. References and nods to earlier Indiana Jones films are peppered throughout, but rather than feeling like charming nods they simply remind the audience of older, better movies.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge – a talented writer but it seems a divisive actor – is a weirdly poor fit as Jones’ goddaughter Helena. In part she feels like a cynical attempt to drive a ‘next-generation’ character into the narrative, in order to enable a series of spin-offs or sequels. In practice she seems a fairly bland re-iteration of the ‘flirty posh English thief’ persona that has been dominating popular culture for years. Her character grates.

It is important to stress there is plenty of strong material in Dial of Destiny: for one thing the film is sandwiched between a sensational extended prologue and a wonderfully inventive finale. It is the content in between that struggles. It is too slow, and too inconsistent. Safe to say there is no legacy being tarnished here – as I often write about mediocre movies, it’s ‘fine‘ – but not damaging one legacy does not you are also building another. In the long term, this will be not so much a sequel as a footnote.