Movie Review - "The Adventures of Tintin" (2011) **1/2

     The Adventures of Tintin is not a movie that I had originally planned on seeing. I had seen the previews and was not overwhelmed and while the reviews were generally positive the couple of people that I knew who saw it in theaters were less than impressed. So it disappeared from my radar for a time. Then during a phone conversation with a movie buddy of mine, he was raving about the film which he had just watched, even somewhat implying that this was one of the better movies he had seen in years. Comparable to Raiders of the Lost Ark I was even told. Well, it is directed by the great Steven Spielberg, so there could be some truth to that. So not only did I add Tintin to my Netflix queue but I also bumped it up to the top of my long list of movies that I'm waiting to see. I had gone from zero expectations to heightened expectation in one phone call. As with most things it seems, the truth lies somewhat in the middle.

     Tintin is a motion captured computer-animated adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. It is based on a series of comic books from Belgian artist Herge' that was around during the 1940's. The comics have been around since 1929 actually, but the movie is based on three specific comics from the 40's. Jamie Bell stars as Tintin, a young journalist with a knack for solving crimes along with his faithful sidekick, his dog Snowy. At an outdoor European market, Tintin buys a model of the famous ship the "Unicorn" but is immediately approached by two mysterious individuals who want to buy it from him, one of them is the sinister Sakharine (Daniel Craig). Tintin refuses the offers and takes the ships home where a fight between Snowy and a cat knocks the ship off a counter, breaking one of the masts which contains a scroll. Tintin doesn't notice the scroll originally but is later led to it by Snowy. The discovery of the scroll will end up leading Tintin on an adventure that is worthy of Indiana Jones and will find him kidnapped aboard a ship, stranded in a desert and zipping through the streets of Morocco in search of lost treasure. He is joined along the way by drunken sea captain Haddock (Andy Serkis) who attempts to help Tintin solve the mystery of the "Unicorn".

     The Adventures of Tintin fits perfectly what I call a "moment" movie. There are moments in this film that are really well made and I was invested in the story. Unfortunately, the scenes that bridge the gap from moment to moment are a bit lackluster, even boring at times. The initial 20-30 minutes of the movie are the best, in my opinion, and I almost wish the movie had stayed in that locale and explored a story there. But it gets to jumping around too much and I think it tries to be too much at one time. It's hard to imagine saying this, but I would have liked to have seen it scaled back just a touch. One of the biggest issues I had is that I simply didn't care about the characters. Perhaps that had something to do with the motion capture animation and something was missing on an emotional level, but I thought they were pretty flat. Only Capt. Haddock seemed to have mutliple levels of personality in my opinion. All that being said, I can definitely see where people may like this movie more than I did. It was released in 3-D in theaters and I wonder if this is a film that may have benefited from seeing it in that format, it's possible. While I don't think Tintin is anywhere  near as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark, I definitely feel it is much better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, so it has that going for it. It's a fine little movie, just don't go in with too high expectations.