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.

Ford's 2000s and a good deal of his 2010s were joyless. He looked either bored with or contemptuous of the material handed to him. But as he's settled into winter years, the damndest thing has happened. He's giving some of the best performances of his career. And he's doing so not by playing the prestige game, but by revisiting the roles that made him Harrison Ford.

There were hints of Ford's resurgence when he returned as Han Solo in "Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens." The intergalactic rogue made him a movie star overnight in 1977, and he seemed happy to put the character to bed on his own terms. In hindsight, I think the sequel trilogy did Solo a huge disservice by busying itself with establishing the new characters, but "Star Wars" was not his franchise. Indiana Jones, however, was Ford through and through, and watching him ache, physically and emotionally, through the entirety of James Mangold's "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" is a thing of melancholy beauty.

It's also something of a stunner given the sheer lousiness of the series' fourth installment, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," a lumpen, listless affair that found Spielberg operating on autopilot (which, even when misfiring on "Hook" or "The Terminal," is something he's never done in his feature filmmaking career). Save for the genuinely inventive "nuke the fridge" sequence, it's nonstop fan service that asks little of Ford. He's just got to show up, flash his ineffable smirk-grimace and unconvincingly pledge his love to Marion.

"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.

Ford's "Dial of Destiny" triumph arrives just a couple of months after the airing of Bill Lawrence, Jason Segel and Brett Goldstein's "Shrinking" on Apple TV+, in which the star turned in a lively performance as a Parkinson's-suffering therapist. Though he's always had an ingratiatingly light touch in crowd-pleasers like "Star Wars" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark," Ford has never felt completely at home in a straight-up comedy (he really labors in "Morning Glory"), but he's an unmannered hoot in "Shrinking."

After decades of perhaps worrying too much about what the industry believes a star of his magnitude should do in their later years, Ford is once again trusting his gut and thriving. We should all be so spritely when/if we breach 80. It's probably asking too much to hope for a Ford/Weir re-teamining, but I did not expect the one-two punch of "Shrinking" and "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny." Let's savor this moment.