It’s not everything you could have hoped for, but for a fan, the final Indiana Jones movie tips the scale as “not bad, not bad at all.”

A film with exhillerating action beats, well-cast villains, fan service in the form of a “Greatest Hits” of the series and warm grace notes for returning members of the family, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is too long, which makes for mischief in the plotting and the pacing.

Paying homage to the earlier films just reminds of us how dazzling real stunts were before cinematic digitalis took over, and how much more expressive Harrison Ford was as a young man than he is as an old one — even an old one “de-aged” for the action-packed late WWII opening gambit of this film.

Indy is an old man when we meet him here, a set-for-retirement professor trying to pass on all he knows to indifferent flower children students in 1969. He’s even trying to teach on what turns out to be “Moon Day.” There’s a tickertape parade for the Apollo 11 Astronauts scheduled for downtown Manhattan, where Hunter College is located.

That’s when these mysterious “agents” working for this German physicist (Mads Mikkelsen) show up, chasing a woman (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) who is anxious to meet Dr. Jones. She has something they want, and in short order, people are killed in pursuit of it.

Helena is the daughter of Indy’s WWII era British colleague, Basil (Toby Jones, seen in flashbacks). She’s finished her doctorate and taken up her father’s obsession, the mysterious Antikythera “dial” of this film’s title. She thinks her godfather, Indy, can help her find it.

Helena is a smart cookie, and a monomanical bruiser. She wants the “Dial” to sell it. The Nazi, vital to the U.S. space program’s current success, wants it to reset history. He, like Helena’s dad, believes the gadget, in its complete form, could direct the user to wormholes in time.

Indy figures out what she’s all about the first, second and third time she crosses him. He doesn’t need to figure out Nazis. They’re who you foil, vote against and when they threaten you, dispatch with extreme prejudice.

No wonder America’s wingnuts are up in arms over this movie.

Indy and Helena’s competing agendas and shared quest will take them to exotic Tangier, Sicilian Syracuse and Greece, trapped, facing death at the hands of Nazis both German and American (Boyd Holbrook, giving another vicious turn) time and again.

“You should have stayed in New York,” Indy is lectured.

“You should have stayed out of POLAND!”

Old friends (John Rhys-Davies) and new ones (Antonio Banderas) will be enlisted. Because that dial the headstrong Helena covets and that the unrepentant Nazi Voller craves could change the outcome of World War II.

“See you in the past, Doctor Jones!”

With Ford over 80, new director to the franchise James Mangold (“Logan,” “Walk the Line,” “3:10 to Yuma”) and the team of screenwriters pass along some of the punchouts to “Fleabag” alumna Waller-Bridge, whose Helena is a two-fisted, cunning and self-dealing addition to the franchise.

She even has a Short Round sidekick, the Spanish Moroccan Teddy (Ethann Isidore).

After throwing in big, digitally-assisted chases in Germany and mid-parade New York in the opening act and a late ’60s Tuk Tuk pursuit through Tangier to begin the second, “Dial of Destiny” slows down to a crawl. The bloated running time suggests they didn’t want to trim expensive sequences to make this picture fly by the way “Raiders” and “The Last Crusade” did.

Forty years-plus into this series, and the dialogue is no longer a flippant, cheesy homage to 1940s action serials. It’s an homage to earlier Indys.

Eels? “They look like SNAKES!”

“No they don’t!”

But for a fan, here’s your make or break point of interest. In that opening act, when a flashback takes Old Man Indy back to a bit of 1944 “Monuments Men” derring do, he and Helena’s English archeologist Dad are trapped on a Nazi train hauling stolen artifacts to some Bavarian hiding place. Among them are the “Antikythera,” the ingenius computer perhaps designed by the proteges of the brilliant ancient Greek scientist and engineer, Archidemes.

Yet there’s another piece that catches the eyes of Indy, his pal Basil and the Nazi physicist and V2 rocket team member Voller on board. It’s a spearhead, the Lance of Longinus, alleged to have been used by a Roman soldier to pierce the side of Jesus on the Cross to hasten his death.

Fans of Indy lore know that Philip Kaufman, who’d go on to film “The Right Stuff,” was obsessed with a book of Medieval lore that attached magical significance to this spear point, “The Spear of Destiny.” He convinced producer George Lucas to build a movie around this relic and the fact that Hitler made it a point of taking possession of it as soon as he came to power and annexed his native Austria, where the spearhead was housed.

Some of the legends “Raiders of the Lost Ark” attaches to the Ark of the Covenant, which has never been found, were also applied to The Lance of Longinus, that no army that possessed it could be defeated in battle.

Including the lance in “Dial of Destiny” completes the franchise’s circle and shows a reverence for all that spun off that unlikely blockbuster over 40 years ago. For a serious fan, that’s as cool as “Easter Eggs” get.

Ford is only allowed a few scenes to get across the weight of his years, what he’s experienced — “A few times in my life I’ve seen things…” — and those he’s lost.

Taking another swipe at what could have been a better finale to “The Last Crusade” seems just as futile as the first try. “Dial of Destiny” doesn’t so much end as drop the curtain.

But for a fan, there’s a warmth in “The Dial of Destiny” experience, a richness in seeing the devotion of old friends and loves, a sentiment not just built from nostalgia, but from a singular moment in popcorn movie history, the first film Siskel & Ebert described as an exhilerating “out of body experience” that reset the bar on summer action.

This one cannot match that. Few films have since.

Yet there’s still pleasure in the old War Horse, his leather jacket and decades out of date fedora. “Dial of Destiny” isn’t a particularly good movie. But it’s still a movie event you won’t want to miss.

Rating: PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, language and smoking

Cast: Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen, Boyd Holbrook, Toby Jones, Thomas Kretschmann, Antonio Banderas and John Rhys-Davies.

Credits: Directed by James Mangold, scripted by Jez Butterworth, John Henry Butterworth, David Koepp and James Mangold. A Disney/Paramount release.

Running time: 2:34