The Adventures of Tintin

The popular Belgian comic-book reporter-sleuth comes to the screen in computer animation, written by Steven Moffatt, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish and directed by Steven Spielberg. The movie boasts the talents of Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, Toby Jones and others, but the characters’ faces are so bland and expressionless that the voices could be anybody’s. The model here is not Hergé’s original strip but Spielberg’s own Raiders of the Lost Ark; unfortunately—and shame on Spielberg for not knowing this—CGI may be great for dinosaurs, but it’s a poor substitute for real stuntmen doing real things. The story is clogged with complications; the screen cluttered with flashy show-off effects; the result is a colorful, meticulously crafted bore—the first of a promised (or threatened) trilogy.