Great Scott, it's Captain Haddock

“The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn” is an animated film of the super-modern variety made by Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg, of all people. It's based on Franco-Belgian cartoonist Hergé's popular comic albums featuring the boyish but brave reporter Tintin, his half-mad and frequently drunken companion Captain Haddock, the incompetent detectives Thomson & Thompson, and (of course) Tintin's dog Snowy.

I read the comic album version of “The Secret of the Unicorn” as a child. The plot of the film was just as I remembered it…which means Jackson and Spielberg successfully tricked me, since the film version is really based on three different Tintin albums. Apart from “The Secret of the Unicorn”, plot elements from “The Crab with the Golden Claws” and “Red Rackham's Treasure” have been incorporated into the storyline. No hard feelings, though!

Since we're talking Hollywood, the action element of the original stories is heavily emphasized, while the crazy element is somewhat less pronounced. It's still there, though. The Thompson Twins are incredibly dim-witted as usual, the opera singer Bianca Castafiore is forever the diva (actually calling a sultan “a peasant”), and little Snowy (the dog, remember?) has more lives than your neighbor's cat. As for Captain Haddock's Scottish accent, I always pictured him that way! Great Scott, of course a crazy “English” sailor is really Scottish… However, it seems his colorful insults have been kept down to a minimum.

To be honest, the constant chases and fights of Jackson-Spielberg's remake bored me after a while, so I'm only giving “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn” three stars. Yet, I suspect the really hardcore Tintin lovers (the kind of guys who continued reading the comic even as adults) will fancy this as a valuable addition to their blistering barnacles, ha ha…