Review: The Adventures of Tintin (2011)

**Spoiler Alert**

I remember Tintin as a soft, well natured and adventure seeking journalist (rather poor choice of characteristics for the job 😉 ) and the film has reproduced that image without trying too hard. Being a comic for all age genres there is some amount of blood and violence depicted in the film. But keeping in mind the sentiments of young kids watching the movie, it is not overdone. For example, the makers of the film made sure that extremes of violence (like death) is kept to imagination of the viewer and such scenes hardly consume any significant time-span in the movie.

The first half of the movie revolves around the replicas of the Unicorn – which, according to the Tintin legend, is a ship lost at sea. Tintin and Snowy are caught in a plot where every effort seems to be made to get their replica. When our young hero decides to investigate he only ends up drawing the ire of the chief villain Sakharine.

After burgling Tintin’s house and finding nothing of significance, Sakharine lures our hero to Marlinspike hall where we are introduced to the second replica of Unicorn. Tintin, in the meanwhile has already got his hands on the parchment (thanks to the ever alert Snowy) which had fallen down from the model ship in his possession.

Away from this boiling plot, the blundering detectives from Scotland Yard keep you entertained with their attempts to apprehend a pick pocket who, in the end, turns out to be a (soft at heart) kleptomaniac.

As Tintin’s pursuit of the mystery of the unicorn heats up, Sakharine believes Tintin has come to know too much. Fate intervenes and Tintin is pick pocketed off the piece of parchment by the time he is kidnapped and brought to a ship (Karaboudjan) which is captained by none other than Captain Haddock.

It is a funny scene when an inebriated Haddock mouths his personally made up expletives against Sakharine and complains that he is now a captor in his own ship only for Tintin to simply push the door and find that it is open. “I expected it to be locked!” is all Haddock could manage.