This article is taken from the August-September 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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“It’s not the years,” a bruised Indiana Jones complained in Raiders of the Lost Ark, “it’s the mileage.” That was more than four decades ago, though. In Harrison Ford’s fifth outing as the bullwhip-toting archaeologist, the years have become a problem for him.

On the surface, The Dial Of Destiny is an enjoyable adventure that takes our hero back to the ground where he has always been most successful: chasing relics across the Middle East. If it doesn’t reach the heights of Raiders or The Last Crusade, it at least erases the memory of Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, a film so misguided that I’ve kept its existence from my children. There have been complaints that the finale is ridiculous. Of course it is, but the Indiana Jones adventures were never a documentary series.

What lifted this episode was its confrontation with the reality that both hero and star are too old for all this. Towards the end, Jones complains that his vertebrae are crumbling, and his wounds ache. Ford turns 81 this year, and he’s in remarkable shape, but nature cannot be denied.

Age is the subplot of the film. When we first met him in Raiders, Jones was an academic hunk, lusted over by his female students. Now they sleep through his lectures. The film is set in the wake of the Moon landings: the future has arrived, and Jones is a man of the past.

This isn’t simply an issue for him. Someone who saw Raiders in the cinema as a 10-year-old has now passed 50. They — okay, we — are different people. Back then, we felt immortal and capable of anything. Now, like Jones, we are familiar with grief, failure and disappointment. We know that the end of the road is ahead of us. Ford, always a great screen presence but one who is particularly good at showing pain, conveys all of this.

Tom Cruise is now 61, old enough for a bus pass

If this makes the film sound bleak, it’s not at all. The opening adventure is a moment of pure nostalgia as special effects give us, once again, a younger Ford, playing Jones at the height of his powers. It is as astonishing and marvellous a sight as any Star Wars spaceship going to light speed. Watching, I briefly wondered whether it would be possible to make whole films like this. Why not have five more episodes of young Jones versus the Nazis?

The answer to that question was delivered, slightly accidentally, by Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning: Part 1. Tom Cruise is now 61, old enough for a bus pass, but the film’s approach to this is total denial. In this summer’s Oppenheimer, you’ll be able to see Matt Damon, now in his early 50s, playing a middle-aged general. Damon’s portrayal of a super-spy in the Jason Bourne films had a big impact on the Mission: Impossible franchise, but the actor knows he’s too old for a reprise now.

Cruise, on the other hand, is defiant. With each sequel his stunts — performed by the star himself — have become more insanely dangerous. There is a theory that Cruise wants to die on set. Nothing here contradicts that idea.

Perhaps he’s just living his best life, having adventures that others can only dream of. His Mission: Impossible co-star Simon Pegg recently described how, taking a break from filming in South Africa, Cruise had flown them in a helicopter to somewhere they could swim with sharks, describing it afterwards as “a real Tom Cruise kind of day”.

The new film, like its predecessors, features car chases, computer hacks, face-masks and exciting moments of cross and double-cross. You could take any of the set-pieces in this one, insert it into any of the others and barely notice. That is, perhaps, a problem.

His character has not developed in any way across three decades

This is the seventh time that Cruise has played Ethan Hunt, the impossiblist missioner of the Impossible Mission Force. That means it is the seventh time he has raced against the clock to save the world from an existential threat. By my count, at least six of these times he’s also been on the run from his own side.

He’s been betrayed by his mentor, watched someone he thought was his wife die, electrocuted himself to disable a bomb in his head before being brought back to life, faked his wife’s death, spent months in a Russian prison and, at various points, carried around quite a lot of unshielded radioactive material. He ought to be an emotional wreck. And dead. Instead he remains utterly unchanged, his character not having developed in any way across nearly three decades.

This stasis has also affected his face: Pegg, seven years younger than Cruise, now appears to have overtaken him. Perhaps it’s hit other body parts, too: technically, Rebecca Ferguson is Cruise’s romantic interest in this film, but there’s no spark between them. Or maybe, filming during the pandemic, even a kiss was too much of a risk.

Cruise has put huge emphasis on authenticity in recent years. Top Gun: Maverick sat actors in fighter jets rather than use computer-generated special effects. For Dead Reckoning, Cruise really did ride a motorbike off a cliff. The action sequences are all the more amazing for it.

Cruise is a fine actor, though. It would be nice to see him engage with an authentic human feeling. That would require something even more dangerous than skydiving: acknowledging that the years matter.