Spielberg hits the target with Tin Tin
Reviewer's Rating: ★★★
A trio of creators blends talents for the ultimate boy’s adventure movie. Director Steven Spielberg, producer Peter Jackson and Belgium artist and writer Hergé are the principals behind the computer-animated, 3-D The Adventures of Tintin. Stuffed with action and swashbuckling, the film swoops and soars with Indiana Jones thrills, Pirates of the Caribbean fun and old-fashioned movie-comedy slapstick.
The late Georges Remi, aka Hergé, introduced comic strip boy hero Tintin in 1929. Tintin’s adventures continued through five decades and two dozen graphic novels. A fearless cub reporter who lives for a good story, Tintin and his heroic fox terrier, Snowy, are the team to beat.
Spielberg and Jackson, another dynamic duo, plus writers Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, hedge their success by combining three Tintin books — The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure — into a single movie. The film’s masterfully staged, ocean-hopping action sequences unfurl in the traffic-filled streets of Tintin’s hometown, sands of North Africa and pirate-plagued waters of the Caribbean.
Capt. Archibald Haddock, Tintin’s ally in his quest to uncover the meaning of a clue held in the scroll he finds stashed in a model of 17th-century warship the Unicorn, enables the plot to exist in both the mid-20th century and the age of New World pirates. Haddock’s unpredictable ability to remember the details of the Unicorn’s centuries-ago demise combined with the scroll Tintin has found and two missing scrolls promise to reveal the sunken ship’s secrets.
Performance-capture animation, based as it is upon filmed performances by actors, builds upon those original performances. Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot) rises through the performance-capture process, injecting Tintin with the high-velocity intelligence and determination the character demands. Even before the mystery of the Unicorn comes to Tintin, a recap of the reporter’s box of page-one clippings shows that he’s already a prize-worthy investigative journalist.
Andy Serkis, a performance-capture animation veteran whose roles include Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and leading ape in the recent Planet of the Apes prequel, renders the Scottish-accented, fond-of-drink and colorful Capt. Haddock a funny, larger-than-life man of the sea. By teaming up with Tintin, a youth who’s far more adult than the captain, the cursed Haddock gets his centuries-late chance to reclaim his glorious seafaring legacy.
Although the exaggerated, capture-motion features of Haddock, Tintin and other human characters in The Adventures of Tintin are distracting early on, they’re much more natural than the ghostly faces that haunt earlier capture-motion animation projects. All in all, The Adventures of Tintin is the technically superior, epic production to be expected from Spielberg and Jackson.
As for the story’s villain, Daniel Craig, totally transformed from his Casino Royale role as James Bond, co-stars as the professorial-looking Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine. Craig and the one-dimensional Sakharine serve their protagonist-challenging purpose, but another, vastly more entertaining character, Snowy, is the movie’s real scene stealer. Loyal and brilliantly resourceful, he’s destined to take his spot among the screen’s great canines.
The Adventures of Tintin earns the sequel, undoubtedly co-starring Snowy, that Spielberg and Jackson have in the works.