Actor Harrison Ford was “deeply moved and humbled” while receiving an honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday.
The 80-year-old, Indiana Jones star was presented with the award ahead of the premiere of Indian Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
During his acceptance speech, Ford said the character he first played in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark has been a great part of his life.
Ford stars alongside Mads Mikkelsen and Phoebe Waller-Bridge (famously known for her role in Fleabag), who plays Jone’s goddaughter.
While Ford received a standing ovation for his career achievements, the film itself got only a “lukewarm” – by Cannes standards.
“Set in 1969, against the backdrop of the space race – in the years between previous films the Last Crusade and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – it finds its protagonist once again fighting Nazis.”
The film’s elaborate action scenes and witty one-liners – mostly made by Waller-Bridge – received an average response inside the theater. During parts of the 142-minute film, audience members could be heard whispering out of boredom in French, according to Variety.
Despite all the applause and awards, Ford has stressed that “Dial of Destiny” is his last performance playing Indiana Jones. It is also the final film in the series.
“I anticipate that it will be the last time that he appears in a film.” While he’s aware that Disney is developing an Indiana Jones series for Disney+, Ford said he “will not be involved in that, if it does come to fruition.”
Indian Jones and the Dial of Destiny – Reviews
The Guardian’s Pete Bradshaw awarded the “taught” movie three stars, saying it had “quite a bit of zip and fun and narrative ingenuity with all its MacGuffiny silliness that the previous film didn’t have.”
He was quite impressed with Waller-Bridge’s performance for her “tremendous co-star turn as Indy’s roguish goddaughter Helena Shaw, who wears shorts and shirt making her look like a grownup, naughty Enid Blyton heroine”.
Bradshaw ended off by saying, “Indiana Jones still has a certain old-school class.”
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The Telegraph’s film critic, Robbie Collin, was a little less impressed and gave the film only two stars for what he described as a “shabby counterfeit of priceless treasure”.
Collins stressed how “the shape and the gleam of it might be superficially convincing for a bit, but the shabbier craftsmanship gets all the more glaring the longer you look.”
