Visually Interesting but...

Rating: Null/10 (16 November 2011)

First up I have to admit that as a kid I was never a big fan of Tintin - he was always that strange kid in a comic book from some other place! - so, with no great expectations regarding this film, I approached it with an open mind.
What I discovered was a film that, although visually very interesting, seemed confused and muddled. First off Tintin is, as I understand it, a Belgian boy reporter, so why were all the characters in the early market scene talking in mock cockney al-la Dick Van Dyke and doing deals in pound stirling and why were all the big houses seemingly a mix of North European Chateaux and English Country Houses? Next the story line starts off with an interesting premise - a mystery hidden within a model ship - but soon descends into a flimsy excuse for dashing from one big set piece to another - including a totally bewildering sequence in Morroco with tanks and bazookas etc (were these left over from the war, or is the story line set during WWII? If the later then where were the Nazis? etc), and by the time any real conclusion is reached I felt so exhausted by all the chases, explosions, pirates, opera singers who can shatter glass (like I didn't see that one coming from a mile away!) etc I no longer really cared! And of course there was the now obligatory open end allowing for the inevitable follow up! What so disappointed me about the film was the fact that this came from Spielberg, a past master at such fast paced adventure films. It seemed that he was not certain himself as to which film he was making - an animated version of a world-wide classic series of books or an animated version of Indianna Jones? There were odd little clues littering the film (a tail of a crashed plane in the dessert with a swastika on it, the aforementioned tanks etc) that seemed to suggest the later but the whole enterprise became so muddled that I guess in the end it didn't really matter.
Finally, for all the marvels of the animation this was, for me, a film without soul. The character of Tintin was just a cipher (as I believe he is in the books), Haddock was just a buffoon, the Thompson Twins plan silly and the other characters utterly forgettable! The only character I came away really like was Snowy the dog! For all the hype this is basically, like this years version of The Three Musketeers, a film that may keep the youngster quiet for a couple of hours, but one that made me feel like "ok, watchable but so what"!