Why Indiana Jones 5 needed more Fleabag

“I’m in it for the money!” is the rather dismaying refrain of Helena Shaw, the character Phoebe Waller-Bridge plays in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. She’s Indy’s goddaughter and a learned archaeologist in her own right, conversant with immense swathes of world history, fluent in any language you can mention (as well as ancient cryptography).

But the second she’s got her hands on the titular relic – an instrument called the “Antikythera”, sometimes called the oldest analogue computer – what does she do? She heartlessly leaves her crestfallen godfather to the mercy of neo-Nazi thugs in New York, and swans off to Tangier to sell this gizmo to the highest bidder.

The film isn’t a disaster, but it’s certainly a disappointment; the same is true of her character. The problem with Helena isn’t the fact that Waller-Bridge is playing her, at all – she’s bright, cocky, spirited and pretty game through all the whirlwind action, impersonal as it gets.

But the character’s thuddingly basic motivation sells her out. Why go to all these lengths establishing her brilliant mind if she just wants to stage an auction for some fez-wearing antiques collectors? It’s a dim way to waste the intellectual awe she might have contributed.

In fairness, you can see some of the Fleabag-copying logic behind this, which speaks to the current quandary of how to get Waller-Bridge set up as a useful presence in Hollywood. She made a $60m deal with Amazon three years ago, which so far appears to have produced nothing. She dropped out of a planned collaboration with Donald Glover on a Mr and Mrs Smith reboot, a new series that’s now going ahead with Maya Erskine instead. Film-wise, she’s had voice work as the quippy droid L3-37 in Solo: A Star Wars Story and the doubtless lucrative job doing a script polish on No Time to Die.

Her Indy gig doesn’t look like it’s establishing a pattern so much as forming the exception to it: writing and producing for herself are more likely to be taking up her time from now on than playing a lead role in someone else’s megalithic blockbuster. People, in fact, may be under the erroneous impression that Waller-Bridge had a more integral hand in Dial of Destiny’s script than she actually did – the four credited writers are Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, David Koepp and the director, James Mangold. But you can be certain she dabbled in some uncredited dialogue polishing and so forth.

Collectively, they clearly decided Helena needed some of that Fleabag edge – to be cynical and worldly, a bit of a mischief-maker, rather than a snooty-pants force for good. Smart in theory, this approach might have worked better if her lines had a bit more snap, or if they’d made her a full-on con artist, like Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve (who still has a heart underneath). Her main assignment instead, pulled off with breezy flair, is just the rattling off of all the fiddly exposition – on matters sciencey and historical – that would have turned into stodge if Harrison Ford had been saddled with it.

It’s certainly not Waller-Bridge’s fault that the goofiness of the movie gets in the way of her performance really being everything you’d hope. She looks alive and romps through it. But it feels like a missed opportunity for her, in a role that’s not far from clicking rather well: maybe her own writing skills should have been harnessed sooner or more extensively, to iron out the problems?

Next on her to-do list, it’s thought, is a writing-producing job on a new Tomb Raider series Amazon are preparing. Clearly, then, the fun of deep-sea diving for ancient artefacts, kicking heavies off planes and racing on rickshaws around Tangier must have sunk in to some degree.

If it doesn’t exactly lock her in as a starring fixture in anything much, being more a one-off diversion than a statement of intent, The Dial of Destiny has certainly pointed PWB towards exorbitant treasure hunts both on and off the screen. You just hope her once-in-a-generation talents don’t get buried for too much longer under mountains of gold.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is released in the UK on June 28 and in the US on June 30