On Thursday, star Harrison Ford stood before a rapturous crowd at the Cannes Film Festival and reminded us that Tom Cruise isn’t the last movie star.
Ford, now 80, gave the festival and the appreciative audience exactly what it wanted: glamour, but also soul, emotion, that familiar crinkly smile and a lot of great history.
That history was on display in coherently edited homage that got the evening started. The salute took off with a clip from Agnès Varda’s “The World of Jacques Demy” (1995), itself a feature-length tribute to her husband that’s a reminder of Ford’s French connections.
In the late 1960s, Demy had wanted to cast the then-unknown Ford in Model Shop but couldn’t convince the studio to hire him. Demy settled for another actor, but he and Varda remained friends with Ford. The actor, looking at the camera, says with a smile, “I’m told that the studio said to forget me, that I had no future in this business.”
After racing through other career touchstones like “Blade Runner” and “Star Wars,” the homage culminated with a title card that proclaimed Ford “one of the greatest stars in the history of cinema.”
When Ford took to the stage of the Lumière theater, which with some 2,000 seats is imposingly large, he looked visibly moved. By his side was the festival’s director, Thierry Frémaux, who, speaking in English, gushed about Ford as giddily as a kid who’s still high after seeing Indy onscreen for the first time. Rather anticlimactically, Frémaux also presented Ford an honorary Palme d’Or.
“I’m very touched, I’m very moved by this,” Ford said. “They say that when you’re about to die, you see your life flash before your eyes. And I just saw my life flash before my eyes — a great part of my life, but not all of my life. My life has been enabled by my lovely wife,” he continued, looking out into the audience at Calista Flockhart.
He then told the attendees that he loved them — people shouted, “We love you!” in return — and after a few more sweetly gruff words, Ford reminded the room that “I have a movie you ought to see.”
That movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, was a disappointment and not just because a funny, misty-eyed and charming Harrison Ford proclaiming his love in the flesh to fans is a tough act to follow.
One problem is that the movie itself plays like a greatest-hits reel. It’s stuffed with Nazis, chase sequences, explosions, crashes and almost every adventure-film cliché that the series has deployed and recycled since it began–over a running time that’s 154-minute slog.
“The Dial of Destiny” — the title alone didn’t bode well — it’s overstuffed and anemic, both too much and not nearly enough.
It’s also wildly unmodulated for roughly the first half. It opens in 1944 Europe with Indy being manhandled by Nazis amid a lot of chaos, his head covered in cloth bag. When the bag comes off, it reveals a distractingly digitally de-aged Ford, looking kind-of-but-not-really like he looked in the first couple of films.
A lot happens and happens again, mostly character introductions and explanations. The movie improves in the second half, slowing and quieting down enough for the actors to do more than run and shout.
By then, the casting of Fleabag, a.k.a. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, as Indy’s latest partner-in-adventure adds charm, whether she’s quipping or flexing her action muscles. She’s fun to watch, as are Mads Mikkelsen, Toby Jones and Antonio Banderas, who exit and enter with winks and sneers.
The real attraction is Ford, who holds attention when the movie doesn’t and whose every wisecrack and flirty gaze make it clear that he didn’t have to be de-aged because he’s immortal.
