Another Sugar-Coated Kids' Story

Rating: 4/10 (26 December 2011)

There must be a stock process now that all film-makers know of that makes your exterior shots all resemble blue-steel gingerbread houses trimmed with frosting. I don't know what it's supposed to do, from a dramatic point of view, but it's just everywhere lately and Scorsese uses it so much in "Hugo" you could end up believing that Paris just needs a rub-down with a giant chamois skin to become the world's biggest Hall of Mirrors. Maybe it's a side-effect of replacing genuine photography with CGI. I don't know and I don't care. It looks silly and I'm tired of it.
Likewise, I am tired of tales like this one that involve a young child on his own, overcoming false obstacles that mostly take the form of curmudgeons you hope will all love him before the story is over. This film is just one tired cliché after another of such stuff. The full cast of modern "Dondi" films is present, with the innocent boy, precocious girl, multiple dubious authority figures, whimsical elders, and so on. You've seen every last one of them over and over.
Sure, there's plenty of steam-punk pseudo-wonder intended to keep the lips of your inner seven-year-old pursed into a little "o" for over an hour. Brass keys, spinning gears, and wind-up contraptions of every kind are in almost every frame of this film, all to make you think that something oh-so-magical is going on in front of you.
Ho.
Now add to that: hum.
While I can't say this one lacked for anything original, it lacked for anything surprising. Each and every set-up is, soon after, resolved in precisely the way you most expect that it will be. Original, perhaps, but familiar all the way.
Your inner seven-year-old will love it. Your actual seven-year-old will probably love it too.
Grown-ups, on the other hand, may wonder before it's over just what it is that $170,000,000 can buy anymore.