Going off the rails

The combination of Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks (in half a dozen parts) is a recipe for inevitable success, and I'm fairly sure that this groundbreaking film will make its $160 million cost back. Indeed, it may become one of those annual treats to which parents take their children. But there's something badly wrong with it.

It is based on Van Allsburg's childhood classic novel in which a small boy wakes up one snowy night to hear a steam train chugging to a halt. When he goes outside to look, he is inveigled on to it by the guard and finds a posse of other children travelling to the North Pole, hoping to see Father Christmas.

There he finds a city populated by elves preparing for the great midnight appearance of Santa. The film is animated using the technique which made Gollum seem real in Lord of the Rings - the actors are motion-captured and the images then manipulated by the animators.

But all the characters look like puppets manipulated by invisible strings, and they have the dead eyes of puppets, too.

This doesn't matter while the movie works and during the first third we are hooked by the magic and power of Van Allsburg's imagination.

Then the film-makers take over. The Polar Express sliding dramatically over ice on the way to the Pole is one thing, but the absurd singing waiters, the arrival at what looks like a giant American shopping mall and the appearance of a Santa straight from a cheapo Christmas card are quite another.

Besides which, the film gets increasingly sentimental and pseudo-religious in tone as it progresses towards the finale.

It looks extraordinary, though the technique hasn't been totally perfected and I could do with a lot less of Mr Hanks. While the skill at work is admirable, the film's philosophy is tosh - cheap Middle-American sentiment.

It is a shame that the initial promise is not maintained: why has Van Allsburg's work been so cauterised of enchantment?

Old Walt Disney at his best still had something The Polar Express hasn't got - heart.

The Polar Express
Cert: U