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Created Dec 24, 2011 12:35PM PST • Edited Dec 09, 2019 03:32AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   Need a lift? I did and The Adventures of Tintin provided it. Light-hearted, highly inventive, magnificently assured, the Belgian boy wonder’s big Hollywood movie proved just the ticket. LOLs are rarely so airy.

   A Tintin newbie, I had no familiarity with the comic-page hero: his investigative reporting exploits, his dog Snowy, his penchant for solving mysteries and putting himself in harm’s way, his extreme earnestness. It didn’t matter, not with Spielberg behind the camera.

   The movie’s menagerie of Western European accents and affects regularly strike tinny notes, often of the fey and foppish variety. Fortunately these are liberally interspersed with genuinely funny, lovingly light-hearted set pieces. Foppishness forgiven, primary director Steven Spielberg and second unit director Peter Jackson earn light-hearted laughs again and again, their cinematic joy dancing across the sky. Amblin entertainment indeed.

   The Adventures of Tintin ends by explicitly setting up a sequel, giving Spielberg and Jackson a new franchise to exploit over the coming decade. “How’s your thirst for adventure, Captain?”

   “Unquenchable, Tintin.”

4. Acting

   Very Good 3.5

   Jamie Bell gives Tintin a boyish clarity of expression, notwithstanding that Bell, 25, is voicing a character whose own voice has yet to change. Hmm…

   Andy Serkis gives the drunken sea-captain a grizzled swagger, doing admirable justice to Haddock’s inventive expletives. “Blistering barnacles!”

   Daniel Craig is less successful voicing the villain.

   Simon Pegg & Nick Frost – two superior comic actors – are ideal as inept detectives Thompson & Thomson.

5. Male Stars Very Good 3.5

6. Female Stars Very Good 3.5

7. Female Costars Very Good 3.5

8. Male Costars Very Good 3.5

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    Spielberg does animation. Actually Spielberg does animation with Peter Jackson directing the 2nd Unit. How’s that for a Fellowship of the Reel dream team? Their extraordinarily joyous filmmaking produces cinematic fun in the extreme.

    Notably, Spielberg’s animation debut premieres the week after Brad Bird’s live action debut. Spielberg’s transmedia journey succeeds with flying colors, whereas Bird’s kind of stumbled.

11. Direction Perfect 5.0

    The establishing sequence recalls Hitchcock’s Rear Window opening in expository brilliance and grace. There is no higher praise.

12. Play OK 2.5

    No disrespect to Hergé, but it is a kid’s comic story after all.

13. Music Great 4.0

14. Visuals Really Great 4.5

    Faces aside, everything’s realistic. Beefy hands, ships in bottles and at sea, fabric, hair, dogs – all look real. The faces are close. They should be, given the dozens of artists working on them. Yet they’re insufficiently expressive, kind of like the lead in a Senior Class Play who’s never going to make it in Hollywood.

15. Content

16. Edge

    Tame 1.4

    Captain Haddock’s endless expletives are wonderfully inoffensive. “Ten thousand thundering typhoons!”

    His comic drunkenness is more questionable given how attitudes toward heavy drinking have rightfully hardened in recent decades.

17. Sex Innocent 1.0

18. Violence Gentle 1.5

19. Rudeness Salty 1.6

21. Reality

    Supernatural 3.7

22. Circumstantial Supernatural 3.7

23. Biological Supernatural 3.4

24. Physical Supernatural 3.9