Review: 'Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny' is a trip back in time, reliving some of the franchise's glory

You may have heard that time travel factors into “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” the fifth — and, considering the lead actor’s advanced age, probably final — movie in the series.

Really, though, all of this series — starring Harrison Ford as the archaeologist, adventurer and Nazi puncher of the title — has been an exercise in time travel. They were movies made in the 1980s (or later), mostly set in the 1930s, with occasional flashbacks to even earlier eras. (Remember River Phoenix as Indy as a Boy Scout, touring Arches National Park?) The series had the magical gift of transporting the audience to those times, and to make us feel like kids watching Indy’s death-defying exploits, no matter how old Indy or Ford got.

That same magic is harder to achieve in this installment — not because Ford is 80 years old, not because he’s largely surrounded by much younger actors, but because so many of us who grew up with Indy have now grown old with him, too. But the magic is still there, in fits and sparks, and when it happens, it’s glorious.

The prologue takes us to 1944, with a young-ish Indy (played by Ford with de-aging technology) trying to get on a Nazi train carrying stolen loot. The commandant, Col. Weber (Thomas Kretschmann), is eager to transport one artifact to Der Führer — but both Indy and Weber’s science adviser, a physicist named Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), know the artifact is a fake. Voller is far more interested in a different artifact, the Antikychera, a circular mechanism from Ancient Greece that’s known as “Archimedes’ dial,” which he thinks can yield unlimited power to the person who possesses it.

This brass-plated MacGuffin goes from Voller to Indy, and later to Indy’s British archaeological colleague, Basil Shaw (Toby Jones). Shaw, we learn later, became obsessed with the dial, to the point of madness.

Flash-forward to 1969, and Indy is living in New York, a professor at a small college about to his retirement. But his quiet, solitary life — we see separation papers, filed by his old love Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) — is disrupted by the return of Basil’s daughter, and Indy’s goddaughter, Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge). Helena is looking for the dial, and suspects Indy has it.

There’s also a CIA agent (Shaunette Renée Wilson) on Helena’s trail, and that operative is working what appears to be an uneasy alliance with some shadowy operatives (Boyd Holbrook and Olivier Richters). These operatives are working for a German rocket scientist named Schmidt, but we recognize quickly that it’s Voller, still looking for the dial.

The bulk of the movie puts the crotchety Indy and the scheming Helena in an uneasy alliance, hopping to Morocco and Italy and Greece on the trail of the dial and the artifacts needed to work it. They run into some old friends — like John Rhys-Davies’ Sallah — and some new ones (no spoilers here), and enlist Helena’s teen accomplice Teddy (Ethann Isidore), who’s as agile a thief as Helena.

Director James Mangold (“Logan,” “Ford vs. Ferrari”) manages to keep the convoluted script — on which he is one of the four credited writers — reasonably coherent, though the mood swings are pronounced. It’s a little slow in the middle, but that’s made up for with a grand finale that’s fast-moving and borderline insane (in a good way).

The magic, and the time travel, is saved for the absolute end of the movie — a scene that references one of the signature scenes of “Raiders in the Lost Ark.” One might dismiss it as fan service, tapping into a nostalgia the movie hasn’t earned. But I enjoyed it, because it delivered the old-fashioned thrill and romanticism that the series delivered at its best.

One more thing: Indiana Jones gets to punch Nazis again. Some movie joys are timeless — even if, unfortunately, they’re also timely.

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‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 30, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, language and smoking. Running time: 153 minutes.