Steven Spielberg’s 2011 animated adventure “The Adventures of Tintin” opens in a Brussels market where a young reporter buys a model ship and, within minutes, two strangers try to buy it off him. That ship is the Unicorn, and the film’s engine is the question of what it carries. The answer involves a sunken vessel, a centuries-old curse, and a drunk sea captain named Archibald Haddock. Spielberg directs; Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish wrote the script; Peter Jackson and Kathleen Kennedy produced. It runs 107 minutes. It is a good film with a hole in the middle of it, and the hole is Tintin himself.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
A Model Ship and Two Thieves
The setup is efficient. Tintin (voiced by Jamie Bell) buys the Unicorn model, then is accosted by an Interpol officer named Barnaby and a collector named Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine, both of whom try and fail to purchase it. The model breaks at home during a chase between Snowy and a cat. A parchment scroll slips out and rolls under the furniture.
Tintin visits the Maritime Library to research the Unicorn’s history. He returns to find the model stolen. He accuses Sakharine at Marlinspike Hall, then notices Sakharine’s own model is unbroken — meaning there are two scrolls, not one. His apartment is ransacked. Barnaby arrives, is assassinated while trying to recover the Unicorn, and Tintin puts the scroll in his wallet. The next morning a pickpocket named Aristides Silk takes it.
That is a lot of plot in a short stretch, and the film moves through it without much breathing room. The mystery is legible, which matters. A lesser version of this movie would lose the thread. This one does not.
The Karaboudjan and Captain Haddock
Tintin is abducted and imprisoned aboard the SS Karaboudjan by Sakharine’s accomplices. He learns Sakharine allied with the ship’s staff and led a mutiny to take control. On board he meets Haddock, the ship’s captain, permanently drunk and unaware of most of his own past.
Tintin, Haddock and Snowy escape the Karaboudjan in a lifeboat. They try to use a second lifeboat to fake their deaths. Sakharine sees through it and sends a seaplane after them. The film then travels half the world with the three of them one step ahead of their pursuers, hunting the Unicorn and the fortune and curse it may hold.
Haddock is the best thing in the movie, and that is not a close call. Andy Serkis plays him and also plays Sir Francis Haddock, the ancestor who once captained the Unicorn. Spielberg suggested Serkis because of his motion-capture work as Gollum and as King Kong, and because Spielberg considers him, in the source’s words, a “great and funny actor.” Serkis gave Haddock a Scottish accent because he felt the character had “a rawness, an emotional availability, a more Celtic kind of feel.”
That instinct was right. Haddock is the only figure in the film with anything like a wound.
Daniel Craig’s Champagne Villain
Daniel Craig voices Sakharine, the main antagonist and a descendant of the pirate Red Rackham. He also voices Red Rackham, who attacked the Unicorn in the film’s backstory. Spielberg described Sakharine as a “champagne villain, cruel when he has to be but with a certain elegance to him.”
Jackson and Spielberg made a real decision here: they promoted Sakharine from a relatively minor character in Hergé’s books to the film’s villain. That is the kind of adaptation choice that usually goes wrong. It works here because Craig plays him dry. He joked that he followed “the English tradition of playing bad guys.”
Nick Frost and Simon Pegg voice Thomson and Thompson, the bumbling detectives who are almost identical despite not being related. The pair was brought in, per the source, out of necessity — the film needed a comedy team that could play identical. They are fine. They are also the clearest example of the film’s habit of filling space with bits.
The cast also includes Daniel Mays as Allan, Gad Elmaleh as Ben Salaad, Toby Jones as Silk, Enn Reitel as Nestor and Mr. Crabtree, Mackenzie Crook as Tom, Tony Curran as Lieutenant Delcourt, and Sonje Fortag as Mrs. Finch.
Two Tintins, One Delay
The film’s production history explains a few things about the finished product. Spielberg acquired the rights to The Adventures of Tintin after Hergé died in 1983, and re-optioned them in 2002. Filming was supposed to start in October 2008 for a 2010 release. Universal Pictures backed out of producing with Paramount Pictures, which had put $30 million into pre-production. Columbia Pictures replaced Universal as co-financer. The release moved to 2011.
That delay cost the film its first Tintin. Thomas Brodie-Sangster was originally cast and departed when filming slipped; Bell replaced him. Jackson had suggested Bell after casting him as Jimmy in his King Kong remake.
| Role | First choice | Final cast |
|---|---|---|
| Tintin | Thomas Brodie-Sangster | Jamie Bell |
| Captain Haddock | — | Andy Serkis |
| Sakharine | — | Daniel Craig |
The comparison that matters is the first row. Brodie-Sangster left over a schedule change, and Bell inherited a role that had already been designed around someone else. Whether that hurt the film is unknowable. What is knowable is that Bell’s Tintin is the least interesting presence on screen.
What the Motion Capture Buys
Principal photography began in January 2009 and finished that July. The film combines voice acting, motion capture and traditional animation. Snowy, notably, was animated traditionally — without motion capture. Serkis joked he was worried Jackson wanted him to play the dog.
The film draws from three Tintin volumes: The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure. Serkis said that rereading the comics for the role, he found they had a surreal Pythonesque quality. That is a fair read of Hergé and a fair description of what the film is reaching for.
The motion capture gives Spielberg a camera that can go anywhere. It also gives the characters a slightly sealed quality, a smoothness that keeps them at a distance. Snowy, animated the old way, is warmer than anyone standing next to him.
Where the Movie Actually Lives
The mystery holds. The set pieces move. The Unicorn’s secret is worth following to the end, and the film’s globe-trotting structure — Tintin and Snowy and Haddock one step ahead of Sakharine — gives it a rhythm that most adventure films of this size lose somewhere in the second act.
What it does not have is a lead. Tintin is a reporter with no interior. He is curious, competent and blank. The film’s tagline promises to show “how far adventure will take you,” and the answer is: very far, with a hero who never seems changed by any of it. Bell is not at fault. The role is written as a pair of eyes.
Haddock is the counterargument. He is drunk, ashamed of his ancestor, unsure of his own history, and Serkis plays all of it. When the film pauses on him, it has a pulse. When it returns to Tintin, it has a plot.
This is the part worth watching, and it is also the part the film treats as supporting business.
The Score
“The Adventures of Tintin” is a well-built machine with a hollow center. The script by Moffat, Wright and Cornish is clever about structure — the two-scroll reveal, the fake-death ruse, the pickpocket thread that pays off — and Spielberg directs the whole thing with the assurance of a man who has done this before and will do it again. The 107 minutes go by.
But the film’s best asset is its second lead, and its biggest liability is its first. Craig’s Sakharine has more flavor in a handful of scenes than Tintin has in the entire runtime. Frost and Pegg are pleasant noise. The motion capture is a tool, not an achievement; it lets the camera do things the story does not need.
The published audience score is 6.9 out of 10 across 5,961 votes. That feels right, and not because it splits the difference. It is the score of a movie that is genuinely good in its parts and genuinely missing something at its center — a franchise starter that never quite justifies why this boy, of all boys, is the one we should follow.
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