The film carries a pedigree that goes beyond Spielberg's involvement. Peter Jackson produces here (and is directing the sequel), and the frequently funny screenplay was penned by the geek trifecta of Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright, and Joe Cornish, three names that should familiar to anybody who spends some time on this very site.

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The story is the amalgamation of three of Hergé's 1940s comics: The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn, and Red Rackham's Treasure. Basically, these are the comics that focus on the weird-insult-spewing, flawed hero Captain Haddock. This is a smart maneuver, given that Tintin's character is intentionally sparse (more on that in a moment).

Here's a brisk description of this equally brisk film: during an unspecified time between 1930-1950 in an unmentioned European city, Tintin and his loyal, semi-sentient dog Snowy buy a model sailing ship at a flea market. After buying the ship, the angular Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine (Daniel Craig) suddenly appears to purchase the model from our hero (to no avail). Several burglaries and one attempted murder later, Tintin is on the case with the comically useless inspectors Thompson and Thomson (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost).

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The mystery of the model ship leads Tintin to the cargo vessel Karaboudjan, where he befriends the besotted Haddock. After that, the inseparable Haddock and Tintin carom from one death-defying situation to the next. Their quest is fraught with whizzing bullets and empty whiskey bottles (but no surreal hallucinations). This may be a family film, but Spielberg doesn't stray from Hergé's recipe of slapstick moral peril.

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Similarly, the screenplay maintains Hergé's refusal to flesh out Tintin's character. Most comic-to-film adaptations are forced to pare down their source material for the multiplex, but for The Adventures of Tintin, the opposite impulse is the temptation. A lesser creative team would've given Tintin a last name, parents, a girlfriend, and a Smash Mouth-scored training montage.

Under the aegis of Spielberg and company, the hero remains an ageless, asexual, ambiguously employed human with a cowlick who talks to his dog a lot. (Just the way Tintin loyalists like their hero.) Tintin is merely the catalyst, the faceless vessel, who gets the adventure started. All you need to know about him is that he's insanely brave and resourceful, ridiculously skilled with firearms, and — to paraphrase a character's biography of him at the film's beginning — "everybody knows who he is." As the man-child who can hold his own among the adults, Tintin is the younger viewer's proxy.

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The comic's oddball idiosyncrasies may be a sticking point for some viewers, namely that Tintin lives in a world seemingly devoid of women. As for the stylized photorealistic CG, I went in expecting the worst and didn't have any problems with it. Overall, it's cartoonish enough to not look soulless, the 3D works well, and the dizzying set pieces are worth the price of admission.

Near the end of the film, there's a single-camera motorcycle chase — involving bazookas, tanks, falcons, exploding dams, and runaway buildings — that is hands-down one of the most gloriously insane scenes I've ever seen committed to film. As a longtime Tintin fan*, I loved seeing Spielberg do his due diligence. As a Spielberg fan, I loved how much it reminded me of the out-of-control tank from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade.

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*I grew up with the books for as early as I can remember, which lead to some weird moments in my childhood, primarily that preschool-era yours truly tacitly assumed that cobras, fakirs, and the global opium trade were real problems adults confronted with regularity.