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A variety of critics and reviews have skewered the latest installment of the "Indiana Jones" series as it faces disaster at the box office.
Eighty-year-old actor Harrison Ford portrayed a grizzled, older version of the adventurous archeology professor, Dr. Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr., who had his debut in 1981’s "Raiders of the Lost Ark." However, the latest film has been trashed by movie critics and has had disappointing box office numbers.
"It’s all but official. ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ will put Disney in the red. Again," Hollywood in Toto reported. "The fifth and presumably final film in the iconic saga opened to a weak $60 million at the U.S. box office." The article went on to note, "’Dial of Destiny’ arrives with a bloated $295 million budget (or worse) plus millions in P&A. That means it’ll take a cinematic miracle for ‘Dial of Destiny’ to break even."
The reviewer observed that the film is one of many recent sequels of old franchises that have alienated their audiences.
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Harrison Ford stars in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.". (Lucasfilm)
"Conservatives worried, and rightly so, that Disney would emasculate another beloved hero in the name of woke female empowerment," film critic Christian Toto wrote. "Disney did just that with Oscar Isaac’s character in ‘The Last Jedi,’ and woke groupthink has taken a firm hold of the studio in recent years. Plus, Disney turned one of film’s most iconic heroes, Luke Skywalker, into a burned-out hermit who rebelled against The Force in ‘The Last Jedi.’"
The BBC, which saw the film at the Cannes Film Festival in France, made a similar comparison about how this is part of a phenomenon of flops that disrespect the franchise’s past, leaving audiences cold.
BBC critic Nicholas Barber observed that much like another "legacy sequel" Ford starred in, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," this one brings back old characters and has the theme of passing the torch to younger actors.
"But it does all this in an even gloomier fashion than The Force Awakens did," Barber wrote. "I'm not sure how many fans want to see Indiana Jones as a broken, helpless old man who cowers in the corner while his patronising goddaughter takes the lead, but that's what we're given, and it's as bleak as it sounds."
Harrison Ford attends the U.K. premiere of "Indiana Jones and the Dial Of Destiny" at Cineworld Leicester Square on June 26, 2023, in London. (Max Cisotti/Dave Benett/WireImage)
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Pop culture website AV Club published a review slamming the film for ending the series with "more of a whimper than a bang."
It noted that the character portraying Jones’ goddaughter, which has been suggested that she might lead the series in future installments, "consistently undermines any likability" she has with the audience by having "unfunny quips left and right" and "often takes center stage in a film that should by all accounts belong to Indy, meaning Dr. Jones ends up feeling oddly secondary in a story that’s supposed to be his grand finale."
National Review scorched the film as "The Counterfeit Indiana Jones" and criticized one of its new characters for being "modeled after the Sixties black activists" yet looking "like an Angela Davis clone from Marvel’s Black Panther." National Review writer Armond White went on to quip, "This quasi-historical updating of Indiana Jones seems part of a scheme to boost the franchise’s ESG score."
Not The Bee, the real news counterpart to satire news website, The Babylon Bee, noted the film’s disastrous box office trajectory and also noted it is, "yet another beloved series that Disney is using to push a woke girlboss agenda while trashing and debasing the legacy characters that we all know and love" and slammed Disney as a whole, "which has spent years plundering much-loved movie franchises and turning them into dreck."
Harrison Ford in a scene from "Indiana Jones And the Temple Of Doom," 1984. (Paramount/Getty Images)
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The Bulwark culture editor Sonny Bunch described the film as a doomed attempt of resurrecting an old franchise.
"The only reason for this film to exist, then, is as an exercise in intellectual property propagation. Indy already got his sendoff in Crystal Skull; they even nodded at the passing of the torch to come. But now the character’s owned by a new distributor with new priorities," Bunch wrote. "And so, Indiana Jones is pressed into duty once again at the behest of the raiders of the lost IP. When their faces melt at the sight of the nine-figure loss headed their way, one imagines they’ll wish they never tried to turn back time."