Film review: The Adventures of Tintin (PG)

There must be a generation of us who first experienced Tintin in five-minute chunks of Red Rackham’s Treasure and The Crab With The Golden Claws on TV every day during the summer holidays. However if you were Scottish, Tintin was a neverending saga that reached its thrilling conclusion two weeks after Scottish students had been herded back into the classroom.

Steven Spielberg’s introduction to Tintin sounds just as unprepossessing. Like many outside Europe, he was unfamiliar with the quiffy Belgian boy reporter until a French critic likened his adventures to Indiana Jones in Raiders Of The Lost Ark. In the past French critics have been wrong about Jerry Lewis, Mickey Rourke and peanut-flavoured crisps, but when comparing heroes with complicated, globetrotting, clue-driven missions of a retro nature, they seem to be on to something.

Certainly, this gorgeously-rendered motion-capture 3D bells-and-whistles Tintin seems to have reinvigorated Spielberg’s spirit of adventure – the director hasn’t seemed quite so giddy and dashing since Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade.

A jaunty set of opening credits and a neat acknowledgement of Hergé’s blunt drawing style set the scene, before launching Tintin (voiced by Jamie Bell) into a treasure trail concerning a model ship which, along with two other models, contains clues to the location of Red Rackham’s long-lost loot. There are breathless, fluid action sequences, some villainy from Red Rackham’s descendant Sakharine (Daniel Craig), and PG swearing from Tintin’s new bipolar boozy chum Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis). Everyone gets caricatured here down to the bowler-hatted Interpol gents Thomson and Thompson (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost).

Tintin’s writers, Doctor Who’s Stephen Moffat, Shaun Of The Dead’s Edgar Wright and Attack The Block’s Joe Cornish, have combined three instalments of the French comic book into one 3D extravaganza, with nods towards other Tintin adventures and also other Spielberg movies. I suppose if you’ve been homaged in films like Super Eight and Cowboys & Aliens this summer you might as well join the bandwagon.

More is promised, next time with Peter Jackson at the helm, and hopefully he’ll find space in the Tintin universe of heroes, villains, eccentrics and smart little white dogs for more than two female characters in 100 minutes. And yet again, we’re reminded that important directors really like motion capture – but do we? The dead-eye problem of films past is less of a problem here, but Tintin has the pink, fleshy sheen of an undercooked pork joint. In other words: he looks a bit like David Cameron.

Unlike Cameron however, Spielberg seems to have found a way of harmonising two conflicting groups and uniting them under his umbrella – namely, those who adore and revere Tintin, and those who previously couldn’t give a stuff.

• On general release from Wednesday

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN (PG)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Running time: 106 minutes

RATING: ****