I had been planning to see this for my birthday, but in the event we decided against due to some truly horrendous reviews. Now that the film has come to Disney+ we watched it over the course of a few nights.
It's not terribly, but it's not particularly good either.
The truth is, these belated sequels are generally poor - somehow Stallone managed to make a decent one with "Rocky Balboa", but it is very much the exception. "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" was terrible, and while "Dial of Destiny" is better, it's not a patch on the original three.
There are several problems, but the biggest of these is the use of CGI in the action scenes - the characters are very obviously weightless and made of rubber, which means there is no peril and no stakes.
There is also, I'm afraid, an issue caused by Indiana Jones' age - like Picard in the Next Generation movies, he's just not able to carry an action movie, which means the bulk of it is carried by Wombat, effectively making Indy no longer the protagonist in his own movie. Which wasn't good in "Mad Max: Fury Road", but at least the rest of that movie made up for it.
All that said, and despite my comment about CGI earlier, I did find the start of the film (with a de-aged Ford) extremely impressive. In fact, we're only a few years away from Disney being able to do an entire film as a WWII period piece, and with Ford providing just the voice (or even a synthesized voice as with Vader and Luke in recent Star Wars projects). Which on the one hand sounds really grim, but on the other probably represents the best way to do any new Indy film. And we know they're not going to just let it lie.
All in all, I'm glad we skipped this one at the cinema, but I also don't regret watching it now that it has become available. That said, I can't see myself ever watching is again - for me, "Indiana Jones" will remain a trilogy, just like "Toy Story", "Lethal Weapon", and others.
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