The 3D Effect is Somewhat Diffuse

Rating: 3/10 (10 September 2012)

I'm a cinema buff and a big fan of Martin Scorsese, so on paper this would appear to be a lock as a great movie. So what happened? The English seem to make these kinds of movies with ease — a film about young people or old people that doesn't talk down or pander to kids or adults. Something like Billy Elliot or Another Year. But despite a uniformly excellent, mostly Brit cast the result is a sappy American film. It seems like Scorsese was channeling Steven Spielberg at his most infantile, prelapsarian, sappy best. And like a good Spielberg movie, Hugo is exceedingly well crafted, it's just too slow, too predictable and not very entertaining. It's like watching a glacier melt.
Most of all it's so sappy, it should come with vial of Insulin. The only two characters who manage a scintilla of interest are Sacha Baron Cohen, whose Station Inspector is a gratifying mixture of Inspector Clousseau and Colonel Klink and Christopher Lee's subtly nuanced Monsieur Labisse. I watched it in 2D so the sequences staged for 3D effect looked dumb, sort of like Dr. Tong's 3D House of Cats on Second City's Monster Chiller Horror Theatre. Now if only Christopher had bared his fangs and drained those two annoying kids of all their blood.