MOVIE REVIEW: Tintin comes stateside and enthralls

Tintin, voiced by Jamie Bell, goes around the world in 'The Adventures of Tintin' with his dog, Snowy.

Is anyone else shocked that “The Adventures of Tintin” is playing in a theater near you? Because there was a time in this country when the only way anyone could watch a Tintin movie was if they tracked down a blurry, bootleg DVD copy or were resourceful enough to buy an All-Region DVD player.

Although an iconic figure in Europe, Tintin wallows in near obscurity in America. Which is why the idea of basing a multi-million dollar blockbuster around a comic character that, to most Americans, is less recognizable than Sunday funnies stalwart Mary Worth seems inexplicably odd. But whatever rationale director Steven Spielberg had for cramming Tintin down all of our throats, please understand he did it for all of the right reasons, and this is why we as a nation have to suppress our gag reflex and just allow the cramming to happen. Because even though “The Adventures of Tintin” may seem foreign and vaguely unsettling, we’re all going to enjoy it by the time it’s through. And that’s a promise (or a threat. It’s up to you).

Loosely adapted from a trio of Tintin stories (“The Crab with the Golden Claws,” “The Secret of the Unicorn” and “Red Rackham’s Treasure,” respectively) “The Adventures of Tintin” opens with the titular boy reporter, who in the film is voiced by Jamie Bell (and for the uninitiated, Tintin is kind of like Nancy Drew if Nancy Drew carried a gun around and wasn’t afraid to use it), as he buys a model ship at a street market.

Although nonplussed when two men immediately attempt to buy the ship from him, Tintin realizes that something is up when he finds his apartment ransacked and the model ship missing. Apparently, the ship contains a mysterious scroll that seems to be a part of a larger puzzle and leads Tintin on an exotic globetrotting adventure. Along with the perpetually soused Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), Tintin will track down the clues and solve the mystery.

Watching human characters in any CGI animated film is always creepy but in “The Adventures of Tintin,” that creepiness is damn near overwhelming. It’s a little difficult watching these nearly human monstrosities wander around with their ruddy Plasticine skin and grotesquely bulbous noses. Tintin creator Herge’s clean, distinctive draftsmanship doesn’t completely translate to the over-rendered, hyper-real world of CGI. Ironically, the look of the original comics is expertly captured in the very Saul Bass-inspired opening credits sequence and makes you wonder why they just didn’t take a more traditional animated route with this material.

But even though Spielberg didn’t fully capture the look of the comic, he manages to capture the feel. With plenty of loving nods to Tintin’s printed exploits and a somewhat obligatory but fun posthumous cameo from Herge himself, there’s an obvious love for the source material. Whatever shortcomings this movie may have are instantly forgotten once you get caught up in the increasingly dazzling set pieces (such as the one that finds Haddock and Tintin chasing down a bad guy as they’re quickly consumed by a flash flood), and its surprisingly smart and grizzly sense of humor (there’s a character that sleeps with their eyes open because they lost their eyelids in a poker game). If anything, “The Adventures of Tintin” represents what “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” might have been if Spielberg had enough foresight to keep George Lucas locked deep within the bowels of Skywalker Ranch where he belongs.

Rating: W W W