Review - The Adventures Of Tintin

It's been a fair old while for the much-talked about Tintin movie. In fact, it took so long in development that it lost its original Tintin (Thomas Sangster) and ultimately Jamie Bell got the job. The story is, of course, a mixture of three different Tintin books - The Crab With The Golden Claws, The Secret Of The Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure (the last two were actually a two part story). Famously, Steven Moffat was the man tasked with writing the movie, but he gave the job up to do Doctor Who and it was finished off by Ed Wright & Joe Cornis - two gentlemen who have fairly impressive resumes already. Of course, the movie is directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Peter Jackson, and the cast has some huge names in it, including Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Andy Serkis.

So, with all those movie points in its favour, and the fact that Tintin is a property that nearly every child should definitely read, and certainly this one did and absolutely loved, it's fair to say my expectations for this movie were fairly high.

Maybe, unfairly high.

Because when I walked out of The Adventures Of Tintin, I have to admit, I was just a little bit bored. For some reason, despite the enormous amount of talent making this movie, there were a lot of moments where it just sort of limped along.

So let's try and be a little bit objective. First off, the motion capture for this movie is without doubt unsurpassed. There is not a moment when the CGI characters don't act in a completely human fashion, and despite the fact that the characters are all based on their comic book counterparts, there's a lot of the actors facial expressions still coming through, and this was most noticeable with Ivan Sakharine, where often you can see Daniel Craig's mannerisms reflected in his character. Of course, having the king of motion capture in the movie - Andy Serkis - it's fair to say that you would expect it to be very high quality. That said, we tend to be more forgiving of animal motion capture than we are of humans, and this is not an issue here.

The other thing that really blew me away (and this comes from a fan point of veiw), was the rather superlative title sequence which had a mini Tintin comic adventure, with nods to nearly all of the Tintin comics that had come before. I often yearn for movie title sequences in a time when they tend to be just thrown away, but this movie comes through in spades, delivering a brilliantly designed sequence that is reminiscient of the old Pink Panther films.

I was very happy with Jamie Bell as Tintin, and Pegg and Frost really surprised me as Thompson and Thomson; at first I wondered if they would deliver the characters that Herge created, but they showed they were more than competent in the roles. The standout of the cast, however, was Daniel Craig, who seemed to positively revel in playing a villain, and gave a great performance, balancing mustache-twirling villian, with a smoother, suaver modern villain. Surprisingly, however, it was Andy Serkis who didn't really gel with me as Captain Haddock. His voice seemed completely wrong for the part, and his behaviour was just a little too ridiculous.

The story was well written, but given the pedigree of Messrs Moffat, Wright and Cornish, it surprised me how little humour there was in the film. Occasionally a chuckle was raised, but it felt as though the movie wanted to deliver more laughs but they just weren't there to do so. Equally, though there were a couple of really nice action sequences, in general it felt as though the action was a little slow and not very energetic. I want to lay the blame at the door of the writers, but in truth this is really the director's area of responsiblity. It's surprising that there are moments of boredom in a Spielberg film, but I really did find myself losing interest frequently throughout the film.

I'm fully prepared to accept that my expectations of this film were possibly too high, but given that I'm sitting here finding it difficult to write a review that actually says something, if not insightful than at the very least entertaining, the fact is I really do feel that this movie is just mediochre. Not terrible, but certainly nothing special.