Old dog, new tricks: 'Call of the Wild' has warm heart under lackluster visuals

RogerEbert.com's Brian Tallerico quipped that The Call of the Wild might have been better with a change in casting.

"They should have gone real dog and CGI Harrison Ford," he tweeted. CGI stands for computer-generated imagery.

That's a fairly accurate description of the actual movie. To make the long journey a collie and St. Bernard mix named Buck seem more spectacular, director Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon) has relied on computer trickery to do what real dogs can't. When Buck makes leaps that make one wonder if he's really from Krypton instead of California, it requires a suspension of disbelief that might challenge Clark Kent.

To be fair to Ford, the redoubtable action star does help keep The Call of the Wild from seeming like a special effects company's sizzle reel. When Buck (played by both a shelter dog named Buckley and motion-capture actor Terry Notary) charges through the Yukon with the rest of a sled team, it sometimes feels like the audience is at a Dave and Buster's watching someone else playing a 1903 version of The Fast and Furious video game.

By aiming for spectacle instead of drama, Sanders has sacrificed the sense of danger that is necessary to make chases, or in this case mail deliveries, from becoming thrilling. The story, adapted by Michael Green (Logan) from Jack London's novel, takes place over a broad stretch of the Pacific coastline, and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (Steven Spielberg's regular director of photography) gets plenty of chances to show off which parts of the region don't need digital enhancement.

Because I haven't read the script that Green turned in, I can't tell if he's to blame for how many of the supporting characters seem as artificial as the dogs and the wolves in the movie. Ford's John Thornton is the only human in the film whose story is as dynamic and involving as Buck's. He lives in the still wild west and is understandably antisocial because he has lost his son.

Green and Sanders give Ford plenty to do for his star paycheck, but they might have been wise to bring in somebody else for the narration. While Ford delightfully played a gruff farm dog in The Secret Life of Pets 2, he's far better off when he's interacting with other actors or a dog (both real and make-believe).

If you've ever had the misfortune of hearing Ford drone flatly during the initial release of Blade Runner or narrate a nature documentary, you know he mumbles just about any text as if he were reciting the instructions from a 1040 tax form aloud. It robs the movie of a sense of adventure, and there are observations the narrator makes that John Thornton couldn't have seen. Ford still fares better than most of his human co-stars. As a tenderfoot prospector with no heart and less brain, Dan Stevens (Beauty and the Beast) should have been given a longer mustache because he has a compulsive urge to twirl it. And his companion Karen Gillan is simply there. Perhaps there is another cut of the movie where Stevens ties her to railroad tracks so that Buck can save her.

Bradley Whitford (Get Out) spends less than two minutes in the movie as Buck's first owner. Like Gillan, he is in the film so briefly that he neither embarrasses himself nor leaves much of an impression. If only Jordan Peele had written his dialogue. It might have been fun to hear him say, "I wish I could vote for William McKinley again."

There also seems to be some confusion as to what sort of audience would pay to see this movie. There is a fight between Buck and the alpha dog of his sled team and a brief scene where a dognapper raised a club to him. People who love animals would be rightly upset by these sequences, and impressionable kids might not be ready for the jolt.

Expect more movies with CGI animals. In the recent Planet of the Apes reboot, the motion capture simians were an ethical alternative to real apes, who shouldn't be exploited for human entertainment. There is something weirdly comforting about the fact that you can't digitize a dog's earnest charm.

MovieStyle on 02/21/2020