The Call of the Wild review: an all-too-adorable, struggle-free theme park for Frozen fans
Dir: Chris Sanders. Cast: Harrison Ford, Dan Stevens, Omar Sy, Karen Gillan, Bradley Whitford, Cara Gee. PG cert, 100 mins
Once read, Jack London’s 1903 novel The Call of the Wild is not easily forgotten – a legitimate masterpiece, still taught in schools, about the tug of war between civilisation and brute nature. A reminder of its opening. “Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.”
Storytelling this mythic deserves a velvety, omniscient voiceover at least at the beginning of Buck’s journey – a Michael Hordern or John Hurt speciality, were they still with us – and a film of real sinew and feeling.
What it doesn’t deserve could make for a long list, but the new adaptation ticks off plenty. You get a bumptious computer-animated pooch, a kitschily green-screened vision of the Yukon, and a massive dose of overly cute doggie antics to make it a family ticket with zero complications. Showing this as a teaching aid ought to be a sackable offence, the whole business being so bright and innocuous you could select it on a long-haul flight, land, and remember nothing.
The main problem for the film is gunning for lovability over authenticity, and to be absolutely fair, achieving neither. Chris Sanders has been a genuine force in animation, co-directing Lilo & Stitch (2002) and the first How to Train Your Dragon (2010) – essentially the same film, but a delightful one.
Human-creature buddy dynamics are clearly his comfort zone, and this must have been wanted in the scenes where Buck cosies up with Harrison Ford, as a widowed outdoorsman with a Santa beard who dominates the film’s back half.
As an alleged live-action debut for Sanders, though, this tumbles down that Lion King (2019) crevasse of being neither fish nor fowl. In fact, the only non-digitised elements of it anywhere to be found are the human performances – and in the case of Dan Stevens, as a vicious gentleman prospector twitching with entitlement, this is no guarantee of staying wedded to reality.
It’s impossible to know how London might have felt about his icy Yukon wastes being dealt with on a sound stage, on the understanding that mountains, sky, townships and avalanches could all just be shipped in by mouse in post-production. Scenery has been painted on as if the Gold Rush were just a jolly, struggle-free theme park for Frozen fans, with Northern Lights swirling glamorously everywhere you look.
Ford doesn’t give a bad performance, but the dog does: the obvious fakery we can (maybe) overlook in a CG lion is far too glaring when it’s man’s best friend. The scenes of Buck rising up to lead a husky pack, to the astonishment of Klondike mailman Perrault (Omar Sy), only tick by thanks to John Powell’s music, while the later ones of Buck’s initiation into a feral life are flatly ruined by how cute the wolves all look.
London’s fable loses all charge when Buck turns his back on human society for a wilderness this darn adorable, tugged towards a natural law less red in tooth and claw than fluffy, snuggly, and fit for sleepovers.
