Directed by: Brad Bird
Starring: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton, Simon Pegg and Michael Nyqvist
Running time: 133 minutes
The Adventures of Tintin
***1/2 out of ****
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Featuring the Voice Talents of: Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost
Running time: 107 minutes
Just in time for you to avoid last-minute holiday shopping, two big-budget films have emerged from an exhaustive drought of mercilessly mediocre excitements to deliver virtuoso action filmmaking that not only quench the lack of genre pictures as of late, but invigorate the screen with inventiveness and intelligence.
They are Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, filling the void of entertainment that the last James Bond entry, Quantum of Solace, left in the mouths of espionage lovers, and The Adventures of Tintin, Spielberg’s giddiest action film since Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Director Brad Bird, responsible for smart family entertainment such as The Incredibles and Ratatouille, leaps to action-packed live-action with the fourth Mission: Impossible installment.
He first made an impact in the animation world with his heartfelt adaptation of Ted Hughes’ The Iron Giant. Now, Bird makes his first mark beyond Pixar’s animation studios with a different kind of giant – this one’s made of steel – and it’s the 160-storey behemoth that stands in the centre of Dubai.
The Burj Khalifa may be the height of 75 IMAX screens or so – the towering format may be the best way to glimpse the spiny steel wonder – and it’s the location for Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) most death-defying act. Nearly the entire section in Dubai, which also features a bewildering sandstorm that blinds the urban landscape, was shot with IMAX cameras, bringing out the city with an unparalleled magnitude.
Hunt has no choice but to climb 11 storeys of the Burj Khalifa to save the world. He’s pursuing Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist), a Russian nuclear strategist looking to kickstart a nuclear war (quite the MacGuffin).
The “impossible” factor of this mission is trickier than using adhesive-based gloves to crawl up the Burj Khalifa. Hunt, broken free from a Moscow prison by fellow IMF agents Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Jane Carter (Paula Patton), must go incognito after his team is blamed for bombing the Kremlin.
With “Ghost Protocol” evoked by the President, any action by the IMF is unsanctioned. So Hunt and his team, alongside intelligence analyst William Brandt (Jeremy Renner, unsurprisingly strong in action mode), are on their own to track down Hendricks and recover Russian nuclear codes.
Bird, an expert director with animation, proved to be a valuable choice for what seemed like a forgotten franchise. When you’re crafting an intricate scene with bone-cracking action that must be pieced together from various cameras at different angles yet remain consistently clear, it helps that you have experience with storyboarding and visualization. These sequences, well-paced and spatially masterful, move at a clip yet are never disorienting or confusing.
Teamed up with veteran cinematographer Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood) and legendary editor Paul Hirsch (Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back), Bird avoids jarring chaos and quick edits. Instead, the breakneck sequences are staged and lit well, interweaving with other scenes of a similar intensity to rachet up suspense.
It also helps matters when your lead actor decides to perform most of his own stunts, including the vertical climb up the Burj Khalifa. Risky business, indeed.
With its globe-trotting escapades and nifty gadgets that seem as if they were designed by Edna Mode herself, Ghost Protocol is more than just a James Bond surrogate. It’s a downright thrilling and outright preposterous action-adventure, the most exciting and competently entertaining Mission yet.
Even though Steven Spielberg turned 65 on Dec. 18, he’s always been a kid at heart. Whether resorting to family friendly sentimentality or luminous effects-driven wonders, his films are usually orchestrated with big crescendoes of action and emotion.
Spielberg’s latest swashbuckler, The Adventures of Tintin, presented without an ounce of bloat or backstory, has the most lifelike motion-capture animation I’ve witnessed on a big screen so far.
For those unfamiliar with the popular series of comic books from Belgian artist Hergé, they follow young journalist/sleuth Tintin (Jamie Bell) and his dog Snowy (the coolest, feistiest screen canine in years). Tintin is known in his community for his driven curiosity to pursue every story that smell of intrigue and adventure.
His latest infectiously exciting excursion sends him across the Meditteranean and through the vast dunes of the Sahara. He is off for Bagghar, a Moroccan port where a model of the Unicorn, a three-masted wartime ship, is hidden.
Inside this model ship is a scroll that contains part of a message that will reveal the co’ordinates to the location of sunken treasure. Tintin possesses one scroll, from the Unicorn model he picked up in a London market and another belongs to the menacing Ivan Sakharine (Daniel Craig), who snatches Tintin and Snowy and holds the duo prisoner on a Mediterranean voyage.
Meanwhile, a mischievous, whiskeyed up sea captain, Archibald Haddock (Andy Serkis, the De Niro of motion-capture character acting), befriends the sleuth and joins him on his pursuit to capture the final scroll before Sakharine and his crew can obtain it.
Beyond Spielberg’s contributions to Tintin’s first big-screen adventure, there are a healthy number of other genre visionaries at-hand on the project. Peter Jackson is the producer and second unit director while Doctor Who scribe Stephen Moffat, Shaun of the Dead’s Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish (Attack the Block) worked on the script.
That’s a big tub of genre talent right there, and as a result, an audience is richly rewarded with sharply-drawn characters (visually and on the page) and plenty of cinematic tricks.
In one dazzling action sequence, Tintin, Haddock, Sakharine and the antagonist's cronies pusue the scrolls as they fly through the Bagghar markets. What makes the sequence so remarkable is that it is done in one impossibly long-winded swoop. Abrupt and disorienting cuts be shamed, Spielberg uses the animation process to achieve a fluidity of action that would be impossible to achieve in any other format.
In its best moments, The Adventures of Tintin recalls the gleeful homage to adventure serials that defined his 1981 masterpiece Raiders of the Lost Ark. At its worst, it’s a tad too convoluted. Most of the time, though, the film delivers old-fashioned thrills with state-of-the-art technology.
Efficient, energetic and supremely entertaining, Tintin is not just a terrific opener to what is destined to become a defining franchise in animated cinema, but an overwhelmingly assuring reminder of what can happen when Hollywood’s two biggest titans of escapism decide to work together.
So, go ahead and grab a large tub of buttered kernels, put your feet up and suspend your belief that gravity is a force and that humans are not invincible: 2011’s most dazzling adventures are at your local theatre. For fans of action cinema, Christmas has come early – and your stocking is double-stuffed.
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