With the last film now shorthand for shoddy plotting, mere plausibility is now the holy grail. Will James Mangold pull it off?
How do you solve a problem like Indiana Jones? As filming begins on chapter five of the swashbuckling archeologist’s adventures, the more pertinent question might be how Lucasfilm and new director James Mangold give Indy one last hurrah without ruining his legacy.
It’s been known for decades that Harrison Ford always preferred doing the Indiana Jones movies to
Star Wars, largely because he always found himself playing second fiddle in George Lucas’s space saga – even if Ford ended up being the only one of the original trio to really carve out a subsequent career as a
Hollywood A-lister. In Raiders of the Lost Ark and its sequels, on the other hand, there was never any question that Ford was front and centre. A hamfisted attempt to usher in a potential successor in 2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Shia LaBeouf’s leather-clad greaser Mutt Williams, turned out to be even less popular than Lucas’s god-awful CGI gophers.