Intriguing, but only visually (it's not an adventure movie)

Rating: 3/10 (9 September 2019)

Starting with the good, Hugo is a visual work of art. The sweeping city, station, and clockwork all have perfectly matched color schemes and demand the viewer's interest. However, the viewer is soon left confused wondering why they were sucked into such a subpar story.
Another part of what draws viewers in is the anticipation of the adventure about to unfold, and that anticipation is certainly the most misleading, even for those who haven't seen the multitude of trailers and posters that advertised this film as a pure adventure. The first act begins by expertly crafting our sense of anticipation, but then it lulls with redundancy until the second act. The next act is even more confusing than the first because it completely abandons the adventure aspect and turns into a melodrama where no one can react appropriately to any of the drama. The final act presents an ode to early cinema that, for people who aren't early cinema buffs, is just as boring as it sounds. They do try to liven it up with a very brief adventure scene (the poster picture and the scene that takes much of the misleading trailers' time), but immediately after the risk of life is over, it's painfully obvious that there was no need to risk life at all, making a terribly unnecessary attempt at raising tension.
Lastly, the acting was not at a level that's expected from a Scorsese film. The usually above average Grace-Mortez was brought low by the English accent (even though they were supposed to be French). A few of her lines were delivered very strangely or overacted because she was too focused on maintaining the accent. I can't tell if Lee was supposed to be intimidating, kind, or both, but he ended up being neither. In the leading role, Butterfield was droll and emotionless. The only exception was the transition scene between the first and second acts, which had an exceptionally poorly written emotional reaction. Kingsley, McCrorey, and Baron Cohen acted exactly as needed, never over- or underperforming, though each of their character's emotions and motivations were very poorly written in some scenes.