“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Fateis a dutifully longing but ultimately rather joyless piece of nostalgic hokum. It’s the fifth installment in the “Indiana Jones” franchise, and while it has its “relentless” action quota, it rarely tries to match (let alone surpass) the ingeniously staged kinetic bravery of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. How could he? “Raiders”, whatever one thinks of it as a movie (I always found it an impersonal trace in its 1940s-action-series-on-steroids excitement), is arguably the most influential blockbuster of the last 45 years, even more than “Star Wars”.

In 1977, George Lucas took us through the looking glass of what would become our all-fantasy-all-the-time movie culture. But it was Steven Spielberg, teaming up with Lucas in “Raiders,” who introduced the escape machine’s structural DNA one thing after another, action movie like endless setting. This means that “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Fate” doesn’t just come after four previous “Indiana Jones” movies. It comes after four decades of high-priced Hollywood action decadence, from the “Fast and Furious” series to the “Mission: Impossible” and “Terminator” and “Lara Croft” and “Transformers” and the “Bond” films of the Last Days (not to mention Marvel Space Operas), all of which owe a boundless debt to the aggro zap of “Raiders” aesthetics.

Spielberg and Lucas are still on board as executive producers, but Spielberg, in “The Dial of Destiny,” hands over the directing reins to James Mangold, who has mostly been a gifted playwright, though he has honed his talents action on “The Wolverine” and “Logan”. Mangold knows his way around whimsical hit artillery. His direction of “The Dial of Destiny” has a competent craft but not much zest for life.

Working from a screenplay he co-wrote with Jez and John-Henry Butterworth and David Koepp, Mangold opens the film with a lengthy prologue, set in Germany towards the end of World War II, in which Indy, performed by a skillfully aged man Harrison Ford, attempts to get his hands on the Spear of Longinus (the knife used to draw Christ’s blood), only to learn that the blade in question is a fake. Instead, he sets his sights on the Antikythera, a hand-held contraption made of ancient gold gears that makes up half of the dial created by Greek mathematician Archimedes in the third century BC. It will be the artifact-gizmo-MacGuffin that hovers over the entire movie. The characters literally never stop talking about it.

In the prologue, Indy rushes to get his hands on the device before Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a mad Nazi scientist, can deliver it to Hitler. Mangold pays a winning homage to Spielberg’s upbeat early ’80s beats, as Indy unravels his neck with a noose and finds himself in a car-vs.-motorcycle chase, only to end up with fellow British archaeologist Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), dueling Voller atop a high-speed train.

Have you ever seen an action sequence unfold on top of a high-speed train? I’ve seen 10,000, and this one, while efficiently executed, is done with just enough CGI that you can see the digital seams. It’s worth noting how daring the action sequences of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” were, a feel developed in the darker, creepier, and unjustly maligned “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” But in the late ’80s, when Spielberg gave us “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” as good as that movie was, it was already (except for Sean Connery) an autopilot overhaul. And “Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull” (2008) was the revamp of the revamp, reducing Indy’s antics to lukewarm formula.

“The Dial of Destiny” at least launches the series in a new direction, being the first “Indiana Jones” movie built around the awesome fact of Harrison Ford’s age. He’s 80 now, and a vibrant 80, still handsome and lean, with a scratch of gray hair and a slower, grittier voice as well as a combative physique that feels more rote than compulsive. After Indy and Basil jump off that train into a river and reclaim the Antikythera (although the other half still needs to be found!), the film cuts to 1969, where Indy himself is now a relic. : an old man living in a cruddy apartment in New York, waking up to his hippie neighbors blasting “Magical Mystery Tour”, pouring a shot of whiskey into his instant coffee while going through his divorce papers.

Mangold sketches the period well, so it represents the present – not literally, but as a signifier of the idea that Professor Henry “Indiana” Jones has been sucked into the modern world. He teaches at Hunter College, where he is about to retire, and keeps this half of the Antikythera hidden in archeology piles. Then his goddaughter, Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller Bridge), introduces herself (they haven’t seen each other in 18 years), announcing that she’s also an archaeologist and would like to team up with Indy to locate the other half of the Antikythera.

It turns out that Helena has mercenary motives. And while Phoebe Waller-Bridge of “Fleabag” fame makes her cheeky, bristly, and deceitful in a cheeky way (she’s like young Maggie Smith with a whole lot of attitude), we never feel in our guts Helena is a chip off the old Indy block. So even if the movie sets her up to be the “new Indy Jones,” I wouldn’t bet the farm on what happens.

Voller, the Nazi enemy, is not gone. He was drafted into NASA, where he led the scientific innovations that led to the Apollo moon landing. That, of course, makes him a riff on Wernher von Braun (not to mention all the other ex-Nazis the US tapped to help invent the space program), but Mads Mikkelsen, with his lizard scowl and her shiny metallic hair, doesn’t. t play Voller as a realistic character. He’s a megalomaniac ogling out of the central cast.

Indy and Helena go after the Grafikos, the missing half of the Antikythera, a journey that will take them from New York to Tangier, where Helena tries to unload the piece they already have at an auction of stolen artifacts. Next, off to Greece and Sicily, to caves, ruins and traps. Voller is right behind them, with three assistants: one (Olivier Richters) is huge, the other (Mark Killeen) shoots anyone on sight and the other (Shaunette Renée Wilson) looks like a black panther . A chase through a ticker parade for Apollo 11 astronauts, with Indy jumping on a police horse and riding it into the subway, is gripping in its sheer absurdity, and a car chase through Tangier, with Indy driving a three-wheeled taxi, has enough comedy to evoke what we cherish in this series. I burst out laughing when Indy jumps into another 3-wheeler just as the one he was riding is smashed to pieces.

But these first strengths are not really followed. Most of the time, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Fate” works by translating Indy’s old daredevil fervor into the pure will be with which he is now in search of the artifact. As the film jumps into international locales, the action begins to feel more conventional and less “Indiana Jones.” Did I mention that the reason the Antikythera is so valuable is that it can create rifts in time that will theoretically allow time travel? The movie actually tests it, with spectacularly absurd results. But the time travel, in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Fate,” is really an unconscious metaphor, since it’s the film that wants to go back in time, completing our love story with the defining role of Harrison Ford. In the abstract, at least, it accomplishes that, down to the emotional diagram of a touching finale, but only by reminding you that even if you reenact the action ethos of the past, it’s much harder to rediscover the thrill.