The Call of the Wild (PG)
2 stars
By the look of the bio of the American author, Jack London, there was a time when he answered the call of the wild himself.
After many adventures on the road and the high seas, he decided to settle for earning his living as a writer. It was only after he had done a lot of living.
A high school dropout at 14, he worked as a sailor in San Francisco Bay, then travelled to Japan. On his return to the US, he rode freight trains across the country with the down-and-out, educating himself at public libraries, and became a socialist along the way.
At 19 years of age he entered university after a cram course but quit his studies again to make his fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush.
It was his muscular adventure stories set in the Yukon, like The Call of the Wild (1903) and its reverse narrative companion piece, White Fang (1906), in which a wild dog is domesticated, that first made him popular with the reading public.
One wonders what London would have made of the latest movie version of The Call of the Wild, in particular what they've done to the dog Buck.
The film written for the screen by Michael Green (who co-wrote Blade Runner 2049) and directed by Chris Sanders (How to Train Your Dragon, Lilo & Stitch) sticks to the original story. There are some changes to the ethnicity of several key characters that will make it acceptable to 21st century filmgoers.
Nothing about the main character, Buck, a Saint Bernard-Scotch Collie cross, needed changing. He was the best of loved pets and had the perfect life with kind and caring owners on a farm in California until he was stolen by one of their staff who was short of cash.
Buck changes owners a couple of times, is taken north and ends up on a team of sled dogs, delivering the US Mail in the Yukon.
As luck would have it, his newest owner is a good and kind man. Omar Sy (such a likeable presence in The Intouchables), a French actor of African descent , plays Perrault, the dog sled master.
His companion Mercedes is played Canadian first nations actor, Cara Gee. They make a far more attractive, winning couple than the pair who drove the sled in the novel.
Buck has adjustments to make in his new life. He has to learn to be part of a pack dog and resist haring off after the first rabbit he sees, and he has to toughen up, and overcome his 'Californian' paws, and get used to running on snow and ice.
Buck, a massive 140-pound pooch who is all heart and courage, should be totally endearing. The problem is he is totally CGI and looks real enough, but has been given a range of cute facial expressions from concerned to kind to quizzical to forlorn to crestfallen that are nothing more than CGI visual effects.
It looks so fake.
Since London's novel was first adapted for the screen in 1923 there have been a number of film and TV versions. A recent film was in the 1970s with the late Charlton Heston, the embodiment of rugged frontiersman, who became a high-profile proponent in the US for the right to bear arms.
As you might expect, Buck, was then played by a dog with four-legs.
Here Buck has been played by Trevor Notary, an actor with a gymnastics background who is known for his motion capture performances as creatures in Avatar, Planet of the Apes, and The Hobbit.
Perhaps the kids won't notice or mind that this doggy protagonist has been anthropomorphised so much you can hardly recognise him.
It's good, though, to see Harrison Ford again, looking hirsute and homespun here, as John Thornton, the man who forms a close bond with Buck and takes him on the last leg of his journey into the wild.
Ford also provides the voiceover with lines that help reinforce the moral points that this family-friendly film wishes to make for children.
Something like "we come and go, but nature's wilderness is always here". Fair enough.
If this is a journey to find Buck's inner wolf, why make him so fake?
