It might have been better as a TV special.

Rating: 6/10 (27 December 2004)

Robert Zemeckis is one of the few filmmakers, along with Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton, whose movies I make a point of seeing - and though his efforts as a producer have been weak ("The Public Eye," "The Frighteners"), he's never directed a movie I hated, although he came really close with "Death Becomes Her." "The Polar Express" doesn't sink to that level, but it's still something of a misfire.
It's not the animation that's a problem - for all the complaints others have made about how creepy the characters are, the only one who truly qualifies is Hero Girl (imagine Queen Latifah if she was a dwarf), and this movie is the kind that could probably only be done with some kind of extraordinary animation... for the genuinely unnerving kind, see "The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb." The trouble is that Zemeckis and co-writer William Broyles Jr. have taken a source that by all accounts (I haven't read the Chris Van Allsburg book) is a quite simple story and blown it up without adding much of any real help; a boy who's not too full of the Christmas spirit is picked up by the Polar Express to go to the North Pole to get it first hand - sounds like it should be full of wonder and emotion. But for some reason it isn't.
A lot of the time the movie's pretty cold for reasons beyond it being snow-driven; the characters don't get much to build them (unusual for a director who often fills his movies with so much warmth and appealing characters), and some moments that should be show-stoppers like the "Hot Chocolate" number somehow fall flat. While the movie does get better as it goes along and it's certainly impressive to look at (and some of the vocal performances are fine, especially Tom Hanks and the late Michael Jeter - to whom the movie's dedicated), "The Polar Express" may have been better served by being a half-hour TV special; "The Snowman" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" didn't need 90 minutes to tell their stories well, and they're still on TV 20 and 40 years after their first airings.
And in spite of the movie's attempts to make the Josh Groban song its main musical element, for my money it's the title track that's the real standout song; it's not only good to listen to, but also brings back pleasant memories of the old Rankin/Bass specials, which have tons of genuine Christmas feeling and are also fun. Something that "The Polar Express," for all its good points, ultimately doesn't qualify as - but there have been far, far worse Christmas movies over the past 10 years ("Jingle All The Way" and the remake of "Miracle On 34th Street" come to mind). I don't regret seeing this, but where's Frosty the Snowman when you need him?