The Disneyfication of Scorsese

Rating: 4/10 (20 May 2012)

A child with a mission teams up with a kindred spirit against the big bad world: that is the central theme of this confused film, which is too convoluted for children, and too juvenile for grown ups. Paris is a city that does not need special effects to appear attractive on screen, and it is the use of unnecessary special effects and cardboard characters (the boy with a mission, his sympathetic friend, the alcoholic uncle, the misanthropic cynic, his long suffering wife, the cruel cop)that are used as twin devices to prop up this flawed film. Other characters (the flower girl, the woman with the dog) barely register, and the story within a story (of the adoption and popularization of cinema technology)is too forced and abridged to ring true. Child actors, if not properly handled, only too easily degenerate into precocious know-it-alls on screen, and this happens in Hugo. The film is not genre-defying; it defies the coherence of multiple genres!