Movie review: 'Tintin' is a fetching proposition

Both eager-to-please and more than a little bit annoying, Steven Spielberg's animated The Adventures of Tintin races from London to the Middle East, from the high seas to the open sky. Airplanes crash. Pirate ships capsize. Even a fat lady sings. The movie, which uses the motion-capture technology most famously employed by Robert Zemeckis in The Polar Express, is a kind of a speeded-up, cartoon version of Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which each action set piece propels us into yet another action set piece.

It's certainly a dazzling technical feat -- and I imagine, if you're a 9-year-old boy, you might just think it's the greatest movie ever made. Most viewers, though, may steadily begin to feel as if they are under assault.

Based on the long-running series of comic books by the Belgian artist Hergé, The Adventures of Tintin introduces us to the journalist Tintin (Jamie Bell) and his trusty dog, Snowy, who buy a model of a famed pirate ship at a street fair. The model, however, contains a secret scroll, which all manner of bad guys want to get their hands on, including Ivanovich Sakharine (Daniel Craig). Let the globe-trotting chase begin.

There is plenty to like here, especially the way Spielberg appropriates traditional live-action filmmaking technique -- the camera swinging through the air or breathlessly following after the performers -- into his digitally generated wonderland. The screenplay, credited to an eccentric U.K. troika of Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead), Joe Cornish (Attack the Block) and Steven Moffat (the Dr. Who TV series), has a droll sense of absurdity. (A pair of bumbling detectives, played by Shaun of the Dead's Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, provide the biggest laughs.)

The central problem, though, is that Tintin is in such a rush to overwhelm the viewer that it never develops an emotional center. The ginger-haired, round-faced title character is a bit of a puzzle. And although the motion-capture images are warmer and more appealing than they have been in films like Zemeckis' Beowulf and A Christmas Carol, the character's heads still look oddly proportioned and weirdly waxen -- like Chuck Close paintings come to life.

Admittedly, I'll take this modest, breezy boy's adventure over the season's other Spielberg title, War Horse, which opens Christmas Day, and which suffocates on its own bombast and self-importance. It's also nice to see a veteran filmmaker with nothing left to prove challenging himself. But in the end The Adventures of Tintin just finds a great director spinning his wheels ... and spinning them ... and spinning them ....