The ghost of Christmas pasteurized

Rating: Null/10 (16 November 2004)

I will no doubt be accused of being a Scrooge, but I'm afraid that, for me, "The Polar Express" was no more than a snow job. Far from arousing my Christmas spirit, the film merely reminded me how much the holiday has been over-sentimentalized and over-commercialized.
The instrumental and song score alone was enough to have me muttering "Bah, humbug!" The music was so in your face that I could almost see the orchestra, especially the string section. It was bad enough having to endure Tom Hanks as the train conductor, without having to contend with the orchestra conductor into the bargain. And then there were all those snippets of classic Christmas carols, both as snatches of the instrumental score and as voiced by Judy Garland, Bing Crosby and the Andrews sisters. They may not have been roasting on an open fire, but they were chestnuts indeed.
If I had to sum up "The Polar Express" in one word, it would be "annoying". Instead of telling a story from beginning to end, it seems to go off in all directions, or at least constantly off on a tangent. The stage business of the train ticket carried hither and thither by the winter wind seems suspiciously like an excuse for the animators to show us how very clever they are ("Look, Ma, no hands!"). I was most definitely NOT impressed by the human figures. To my eye, they looked like nothing so much as wax dummies from Madame Tussaud's, and they moved jerkily as well. I might as well as have been watching the string puppets in "Team America: World Police".
There was, to be honest, only one moment when "The Polar Express" evoked any real emotion in this reviewer's breast, and that came almost at the very end, when the train conductor punches the children's tickets with a special message for each one.
"The Polar Express" takes a host of Christmas traditions and milks them for all their worth. But -- for this critic, at least -- the end result is as flat, warmed-over, and even sour-tasting as a glass of milk left standing overnight for a Santa who never comes.