Film review: The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

JUST as the best covers band in the world is no substitute for the real thing, blockbuster filmmakers who slavishly pay tribute to Steven Spielberg never quite nail the breathless sense of excitement that their mentor’s best work can inspire.

Directors such as JJ Abrams may occasionally find favour by serving up Spielberg-endorsed facsimiles such as Super 8, but that’s largely because Spielberg himself has been on autopilot for the past 20-odd years, churning out fair-to-forgettable cinematic theme park rides (Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds and, oh dear, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) to keep his paymasters happy while concentrating his creative efforts on becoming the very fine, serious-minded director of Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, AI and Munich.

When Spielberg is on form, though, no-one else can touch him, and that’s pretty much the case with The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. Displaying the kind of giddy-as-a-schoolboy energy that made the first three Indiana Jones films such a joy, this is a family-oriented blockbuster made with the kind of heart, passion, wit and visual inventiveness that Spielberg’s name used to guarantee. That’s a relief because the film also marks his first foray into performance-capture CG animation, a format that has a tendency to render actors lifeless on screen, especially when placed in a fully animated world.

In this instance, though, Spielberg seems to have solved the dead-eye issue that did for Polar Express and its ilk. His Tintin (played by Jamie Bell and articulated by a team of animators from producer Peter Jackson’s Weta studios) is full of twinkly-eyed vitality that brings the distinctive, quiff-sporting boy reporter of Belgian creator Hergé’s comics to the big screen in a way that honours the source material while deviating from it enough to create a proper movie experience in its own right.

Spielberg nods to this early on with a lovely sight gag in which a street market artist captures Tintin’s likeness exactly as Hergé would draw him. Respect duly paid, the film kicks into high adventure mode almost immediately, ping-ponging Tintin and his faithful, scene-stealing dog Snowy across the globe in search of the sunken treasure. Along the way we’re introduced to Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), whose origins as a man of fallen nobility supplies the film with its main story arc.

Here, Serkis’s stated decision to play him as a sort of 1930s Rab C Nesbitt – replete with amusing Scottish accent and unquenchable thirst for the water of life – works a treat. He’s a rich comic creation, a man full of tragedy and woe and Serkis plays him with just the right blend of mirth and melancholy. Spielberg compliments him too by refusing to sanitise the character: simply because it’s a big-budget family movie, that’s no reason whisky shouldn’t feature prominently for comic effect.

That Tintin hasn’t been “Hollywoodised” in the pejorative sense of the word can perhaps also be attributed in part to the script – a lovingly crafted, wonderfully funny collaborative Brit effort by Doctor Who headwriter Steven Moffat, Shaun of the Dead co-writer/director Edgar Wright and Attack the Block’s Joe Cornish. Clearly fans of Hergé and Spielberg alike, their passion for both comes through in the way they flesh out the characters’ eccentricities in delectable fashion and weave in little tributes to their director without losing sight of the story. Indeed, if there’s a complaint, it’s that the decision to film it in 3D doesn’t really add anything to the movie. Its thrills are entirely down to Spielberg working at the top of his blockbuster game again, something that no amount of technology can disguise or fake.

Rating: ****

• The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is in cinemas from today.