Fluffy Spectacle not Up to Scorsese Standards

Rating: 3/10 (9 March 2012)

I was looking forward to seeing Hugo. It started, as most movies do, promisingly enough but by the time the end credits rolled, I was left with an empty, unsatisfied feeling. I couldn't put it exactly into words at first but I stumbled across another review that pretty much summed it up: the entire "mystery" of Hugo isn't really that big of a deal. I didn't read the book, but it seems that Hugo is really two movies awkwardly stitched together - one of a mechanically-inclined orphan searching for a final message from his late father and another of a forgotten cinema pioneer whose life has descended into bitterness. Frustratingly, the boy's storyline is conveniently dropped somewhere along the line. The Scorsese touch is absent here. Let's face it, this film could've been made by any Hollywood vet with an army of CGI effects people behind him (or her). At certain moments I thought I was watching a Spielberg picture despite the overacting from the film's youthful protagonists (speaking in ridiculous British accents in lieu of French) -- clearly not the work of the director of E.T. A sorry script that telegraphs it's resolutions from a million miles away (again, this could be the fault of the original source material), poor casting and an almost mechanical - pun intended - devotion to cinematic clichés left me cold. Technically polished and full of a generous amount of eye-candy, Hugo will most certainly have it's fans. But when we're dealing with a filmmaker of Scorsese's caliber, I think it's easy to understand that Hugo just doesn't measure up to a Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore or Taxi Driver.