Movie review: 3-D 'Hugo' is child's play for adults

Martin Scorsese's Hugo is a children's film for grown-ups -- grown-up film buffs.

It's a charming and quite gorgeous exercise in the few corners of the medium where the Oscar-winning filmmaker has next to no experience -- children's stories, comedy and 3-D. And even though it is too long and the master has yet to develop much of a comic touch, this adaptation of Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a stunning exercise in 3-D and a delightful celebration of Scorsese's lifelong love of the movies -- something he, like Hugo, developed in childhood.

Hugo (Asa Butterfield) lives in the bowels of a Paris train station in between the world wars. He is an orphan who hides out, carrying on the job a drunken uncle left him with -- servicing the huge clocks there. He slips in and out of the station, getting by on stealing food and drink, hoping not to be noticed by the station inspector, Gustav (Sacha Baron Cohen).

Hugo is a tinkerer, something he picked up from his late father (Jude Law). His favorite project is an old clockwork automaton, a wind-up man whom he tries to fix with parts stolen from a toy shop run by a cranky old man, played by the great Ben Kingsley.

When the old man catches Hugo, he seizes the boy's notebook, full of his father's drawings and fixes for the automaton. Hugo must work in the shop to win the notebook back, and even then, the mean old man may turn him in to the meaner wounded war vet Gustav, who patrols the station with a Doberman.

Scorsese uses this vintage Paris railway station set to stage marvelous 3-D chases, on foot -- his camera following Hugo up ladders, down alleys, weaving through crowds. Hugo is the best looking 3-D movie since Alice in Wonderland. But the story -- period details and mysteries notwithstanding -- is too slight to support this length. It's an 80-minute bonbon struggling to break out of a 2-hour-and-10-minute soufflé.