The unquenchably curious young reporter Tintin and his fiercely loyal dog Snowy as they discover a model ship carrying an explosive secret. Drawn into a centuries-old mystery, Tintin finds himself in the sightlines of Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine, a diabolical villain who believes Tintin has stolen a priceless treasure tied to dastardly pirate named Red Rackham. But with the help of his dog Snowy, the salty, cantankerous Captain Haddock and the bumbling detectives Thompson & Thomson, Tintin will travel half the world, outwitting and outrunning his enemies in a breathless chase to find the final resting place of The Unicorn, a shipwreck that may hold the key to vast fortune... and an ancient curse. - skip ad - Genres: Kids/Family, Action/Adventure, Animation and Adaptation Running Time: 1 hr. 41 min. Release Date: December 21st, 2011 (wide) MPAA Rating: PG for for adventure action violence, some drunkenness and brief smoking. Distributor: Paramount Pictures Cast And Credits Starring: Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost Directed by: Steven Spielberg Produced by: Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy, Peter Jackson

Before Indiana Jones cracked his bullwhip for some old-fashioned Hollywood fun, Tintin circled the globe in the name of European divertissement. The pen-and-ink creation of the Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi (1907-83), known better as Hergé, Tintin is the charming boy reporter and adventurer who, with his white fox terrier Snowy close at heel, has traveled the world since 1929 in action-packed yarns with titles like “Cigars of the Pharaoh.” It was only a matter of time before Tintin went Hollywood. And, yowza, has he hit it big and hard in “The Adventures of Tintin,” a marvel of gee-wizardry and a night’s entertainment that can feel like a lifetime.



What took him so long? Certainly Tintin comes with many of the prerequisites for big-screen exploits, including pluck, ingenuity, derring-do, exotic locales, and a ready-made team of friends and foes. Many of these are busily at play in “The Adventures of Tintin,” an animated boy’s own adventure directed by Steven Spielberg, that eternal Hollywood boy wonder. Almost wholly cooked up in a computer and using motion-capture technology, it turns on a riddle that takes the story from sea to desert and other landlubbing destinations, including an imaginary Moroccan city, Bagghar (a play on a French word for brawl, bagarre), which looks as canned as a sand-strewn set for a Bob Hope and Bing Crosby road movie if tidier and pricier.

Written by Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, “The Adventures of Tintin” is stitched together from three Hergé books, including “The Secret of the Unicorn.” It begins promisingly enough when Tintin (voiced by Jamie Bell) spots a model of a ship, the Unicorn, in a market. Taken with its painstaking detail â€" a nice metaphor for this precisely wrought, vaguely 1940s world â€" he buys the model, though his purchase is challenged by a mustachioed American detective, Barnaby (Joe Starr), and a meddler of ominous provenance, Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine (Daniel Craig), whose name is a reminder that Tintin’s inaugural comic pitted him against the Bolsheviks. (“I think the dirty little bourgeois is asleep,” a Bolshevik agent says in “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets,” before failing to blow him up.)

Tintin keeps the model, in which he finds the riddle that sets him and Snowy off on a series of zippily choreographed chases that first take them from their home in Brussels to a freighter, where they meet Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), a blustering boozer who’s more amusing on the page than onscreen. Haddock, one of Tintin’s frequent comrades in adventure, holds the secret to the mystery, though he’s initially too loaded to know it. (Tintin may tsk-tsk Haddock’s sousing ways, but the movie takes a blithely amused view of drunkenness.) It’s only later, when Haddock dries up while lost and hallucinating in a desert â€" in a wonderful sequence in which crested sand dunes melt into peaking ocean waves and back again â€" does he offer relief beyond the comic.

It’s easy to see why Mr. Spielberg took on Tintin, which he has described as “Indiana Jones for kids” (a redundant notion). The most involved chase sequence in the movie finds Tintin and company creatively racing through, and laying waste to, Bagghar, much as Indy does to a stretch of Cairo in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” In contrast to “Raiders,” which sees Indy shooting a sword-wielding opponent in a jokey illustration of Western imperialist might, Tintin’s adventures here feel willfully guileless: colonialism may haunt Tintin’s world as imagined by Hergé, but it doesn’t trouble this one. Tintin is racing after the riddle of the Unicorn, but mostly he’s chasing mystery for mystery’s sake, a search that â€" once he bonds with Haddock â€" transforms into a more personally redemptive quest.

In this boy-chases-man world there’s scarcely room for women. Hope and Crosby had Dorothy Lamour, but that kind of honey trap would bring Eros into the equation, thereby endangering the childlike innocence ( really, a convenient naïveté) that defines Tintin, a character who’s as resolutely neutered as his dog presumably is. So instead, the story trots out a sole distaff representative in the ludicrous form of Bianca Castafiore (Kim Stengel), a dowager diva with a barrel build and a glass-shattering voice. One high note later and the scene has gone kablooey, setting off another round of Rube Goldberg-like calamities that keep Tintin hopping and running and jumping and driving and chasing â€" as the virtual cameras swoop and dip â€" like a Tom and Jerry cartoon on repeat.

Mr. Bell imports boyish wonder into Tintin’s voice, but there’s nothing he can do with the way the character looks. Neither fully human nor fully animated, Mr. Spielberg’s Tintin resembles Hergé’s creation yet is eerily different, as if, like Pinocchio’s, his transformation into human form had been prematurely interrupted. This Tintin is lifelike, but without the pulse of real life. The problem is that Mr. Spielberg has erred on the side of verisimilitude with a technology â€" in which an actor’s movements and facial gestures are transmitted via electrodes to a computer â€" that because it’s a simulacrum of life, still works better for otherworldly creatures like the blue Pandorans in “Avatar” or broad caricatures like Tintin’s bubbling allies, the detective duo Thompson and Thomson (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost).

Drawn in a simple, elegant style known as clear line, Hergé’s Tintin has a spherical head, a stub nose and black ovals for eyes. His half-circle brows sit on his face like accent marks and, with his red-smudged cheeks and beads of sweat that invariably pop off his head, give Tintin surprising expressivity.

The simplicity is as crucial to the comic’s power as is Hergé’s ability to turn a recognizable world into bold lines and blots of color. It’s a face that looks like a mask, one readers can slip on as they rush through the story or leisurely turn the page. And it’s a face that, along with Tintin’s asexuality and lack of a family, makes him into a marvelous blank, an avatar for armchair adventurers.

Like the screen Tintin, the movie proves less than inviting because it’s been so wildly overworked: there is hardly a moment of downtime, a chance to catch your breath or contemplate the tension between the animated Expressionism and the photo-realist flourishes. Relax, you think, as Tintin and the story rush off again, as if Mr. Spielberg were afraid of losing us with European-style longueurs. Bore us? He’s Steven Spielberg! This lack of modulation grows tedious, which is too bad because, as always with him, there are interludes of cinematic delight, when his visual imagination (like the transition in which Tintin and Haddock seem to appear in a puddle someone steps in) and his Spielbergian playfulness get the better of his insistence on bludgeoning us with technique.