lost boy fixes broken man

Rating: 5/10 (15 December 2011)

I took my two kids, 10 and 8, to see this tonight, thinking I like Scorsese and Ben Kingsley, they like 3D and child leads, so we'll all be happy.
A straight tale about two kids from opposite side of the tracks who go off on a robot-building adventure would have really entertained my children. A straight telling of the story of Georges Méliès and his contribution to the early days of cinema, filtered through the Scorsese aesthetic, would have really entertained me. Instead, what we get in Hugo is neither one nor the other, and so it is all a bit flat and lifeless. There is the heavy-handed morality tale element that no Hollywood film can travel without, this time about a broken boy fixing a broken automaton in order to heal an old's man's' broken spirit so he can love life again... It is layered on a bit thick, tipping the story over into gooey sentimentality.
And Sacha Baron Cohen is criminally under-used.
The opening sequence does show a heightened awareness of how to use 3D, and this element is kept up throughout. We know Scorsese loves cinema, but his attempted homage here is at the expense of emotional power in the narrative. It was the same failing that de-railed Gangs of New York, the attempt to incorporate reverence for history undermining the drive and pace of the storyline.
I left the theatre admiring the photography, and re-writing the script in my head.