Die Hard, Rambo 5, Indiana Jones 5

Those looking for analogies between Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and other films have in recent months turned time and again to Top Gun 2, picturing this fellow '80s retread explode at the box office and dominate the summer season the Tom Cruise film did in 2022.

Yet if one is looking for an '80s analogy it may be that Top Gun 2 is a less appropriate point of comparison than other major '80s action films others generally choose not to bring up--most obviously Die Hard 5 (A Good Day to Die Hard) and Rambo 5 (Rambo: Last Blood).

Why them? Like Indiana Jones Rambo and Die Hard were among the glories of '80s-era Hollywood action film-making--with Rambo: First Blood, Part II, far and away the biggest of the distinctly "'80s" action movies (action and not action-comedy, bullet-riddled, and very R-rated), and a major cultural moment, with Die Hard perhaps the most celebrated of them--launching a decade-long frenzy of imitation that produced considerable successes in its own right (not least the Steven Seagal career-high film Under Siege, Speed, and Harrison Ford's own Air Force One).

Also like Rambo and Die Hard the third film in the franchise (1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) was followed by a long pause in which further continuations generally remained in "development hell," with the fourth film coming only in the late '00s period of '80s nostalgia, and specifically the dozen months or so between the summers of 2007 and 2008 (with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull hitting theaters a year after Live Free or Die Hard, and mere months after Rambo). Like those others failing to generate enormous enthusiasm for further follow-up, the next movie came only years later.

In the cases of Die Hard and Rambo those films ended the franchise on the sourest of notes both commercially and critically. (I remember a critic joking that 2013's Die Hard 5 must have been assembled by a robot because no human would have put the thing in theaters--while watching 2019's Rambo 5 left Rambo's own creator David Morrell saying that he "felt degraded and dehumanized after I left the theater," and that he "was less a human being for having seen it.")

Negative as the reviews for Indiana Jones 5 have been I expect no reactions as harsh as those. (Certainly no critic I have read yet claimed to have deprived of their humanity by seeing the movie!) But the reviews have indeed been negative--enough so to give an impression of a franchise having fallen a long way from its glory days--and it is plausible indeed that in the end Indiana Jones 5 will do no more to keep its (far more expensive) franchise going than Die Hard 5 and Rambo 5 did their own.